Sunday, September 14, 2008

Violence .. is it worth it ?

I still do not know whether I am the radical kind, those impatient groups of people who want the reforms to happen in just a wink of the eye, or those persistent groups of people who take the risk of waiting for the reforms to come their way to react. The recent bombings in Delhi, near Noida where I work and a movie made me write an entry in this blog. I normally am not a politics fan / fanatic and am least interested in some thing which depresses anyone who is outside ITS boundaries.

The movie I saw during my 1 week visit in Kerala was a movie named 'Thalappavu' (something which conceals the head). To talk about the movie as a critic I felt that the plot was pretty good. But the way it was told was not so digestive for a normal viewer. The movie frequently has flashbacks and further flashbacks which I think was a deliberate attempt by the director to be flashy. The story closely follows the life of a policeman who meets a extremist who works for the Wayanad farmers. The policeman is forced to kill this extremist by a higher official and that ultimately ruins his personal life. The point I liked about the movie is that the background music has been used very carefully. The characters are great and their portrayal has been immaculate. The torture by the landlords during those times and the corrupt police officials were factors which provoked these people to be extremists.

What I was think of was the cause here. Is the extremism justified any how and if yes are the blasts in Delhi justified by any chance.

'An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' - Mahtma Gandhi

Friday, September 5, 2008

What a week !

This week was a long one. Lots of work to be done, or atleast was asked from us. Amit and Abhilash had to put in extra hours to get it done and the work still continues as I write this post. My work is some what done so I am calmly sitting at a corner so that no one notices me.

The bugs that I got were all bugs which arose as a result of some miscommunication. Sometimes I understood it wrong, otherwise they interpreted it differently. 'They' are obviously NOT wrong. The major bug that took most my time was the one related to the Sortable list not working in IE7. I tried juggling with those classes but reached no where. At last a simple ' ' solved my problem :). The next major one was that the auto-completer in scriptaculous kept on disappearing when the container div's scroll was clicked. This was obviously because all the browsers except Firefox interpreted this as a valid auto-complete text field blur. The work around done was to entirely take off the onBlur event and be entirely dependent on the keypress(ESC key) and the selection of the element inside the autocomplete list.

Coding for the browser was also something we learned here. Amit had lots of problems uploading flv files via Safari. As I understand Safari gives a String Object instead of a StringIO object and therefore checking the content type becomes impossible. The attachment_fu plug-in therefore bombs and gives errors. Kudos to Amit for solving this bug.

To top it all up, I was to travel home today and my flight got canceled. Can't still believe it. This guy calls me up early in the morning to say that the flight has been canceled. He asks me the mode of refund and pleasantly says thanks. I had to spend a thousand rupees more to get a ticket home and am 'supposed' to go tomorrow. Let's hope that works out.