Baat karne se hi baat banti hain :)

A great article at pluggd.in stating the importance of talking your way out. People often don't realize the importance of trying to talk their way out. Some examples from practical life:

I go for evening walks. One day i forgot my purse and wanted to eat an icecream, Badly. I thought lets ask the icecream vala for a credit. I went and said ki bhiya kal paise de dunga aaj laya nahin. He said, "Sir, aap toh roj aate ho. Kal de dena :)"

I had one stubborn client how refused to pick up my calls. I thought he was purposely ignoring me. But still I gave my self respect a back seat and went ahead to meet him although I had called him many times before. He welcomed me and I found he was really busy and wasn't picking up anyone's calls. But still he listened to me and I got my work done.

A not so related example is: Being in the service industry you have to talk to your clients. You have to give them support. I have realized the more personal you get with them, the more comfortable they are. For example, Whenever write a email to a particular person, I address him as Bhiya. and Ya if you call them just to know whats up and if they are having any problems, they feel a sense of security.

Google Buzz #fail

I have hated google buzz from its very existence. I nipped the bud on the very first day.

Why? Because I thought it was a cheap twitter clone and it was made probably because Google was not able to acquire Twitter or may be the people behind it. But anyways the interface really sucked. Google has to understand that the same interface will not work at all places. If one UI works good in Email and Feed readers it might not in a micro blogging platform.

Also following people's update on one more people means more waste(?) of time. I hate wasting time. I really do. Also it would mean that i wanted to micro blog something then I will have a choice between Twitter and Google Buzz, thus adding confusion to my life, stripping it of its minimalism.

Also I really hated the idea of Google trying to take over my life by automating the the people I follow and the people who follow me. And ya imagine following celebrity people based on their emails. This would never happen. And ya taking of emails, I dont want my my email client to be filled up by people's blatter. I want to keep my work(email) separate from social networking. Integrating both of them makes me more vulnerable to wasting time.

And ya what sparked this anger. I was reading a friend's buzz that he posted on twitter and wasted to point out a google buzz fail. See this buzz . The minimized text is readable. Expand it and you will not be able to read it. Ha Ha #fail #google #buzz.

And ya if you dont know how to deactivate buzz, here are the instructions. RIP Google Buzz.

The creativity of constraints

I follow minimalism as an important rule of my life. It helps me to focus all my attentions to necessary things and lets me do things in time.

This post highlights another benefit of minimalism - creativity. Its true , when you have less resources at your disposal, you tend to be creative with them. Some examples from my practical life:

Time - Yes time is important. Time is limited. Time once spent will never come back. I value my time the most. Thus I never get into discussions that dont concern me or my work. I avoid using facebook and twitter during work. I usually do sprints, of an hour each. During this hour I work with full focus. Between each sprint is the social networking time. I hate working in the night and try to finish my work before night.

Startup - Being a part of startup the resources at your disposal are really limited. It makes think of innovative ideas.

Startup working from home cum office - The biggest challenge

As this blog points out, the biggest problem working from home is self discipline. You tend to work on internet where theres a very thin line between your work and facebook/gmail.

It might happen that you are in front of your laptop 12 hours a day but still nothing gets done the whole day. This happens because there is no boundary between work and leisure and as a result your productivity sucks. The problem gets worse in a startup when you have no bosses to tell you what to do.

However the first link mentions a few ways to streamline your work schedule and get the most out of it. These are:

• Decide on the number of work hours per week or may be decide the max number of working hours in day.

• Decide the most important work

• Postpone the unimportant works

• Always have the big picture in mind.

• Have regular meetings and a healthy communication with teammates.

Important rules of my life

Everyone has some principles by which they stand. The principles which help them to recover from difficult situations and give them peace. For some people the mere teachings of a religion serve the purpose. But I don't believe in any religion because I think its a glorified wrapper around something very simple.

Anyways the following things always come to my mind whenever I am caught up in a situation:

Never ever trouble yourself.

For example you want to vent out your frustration on anybody but instead you are troubling yourself by not doing so and sulking. Do it and get over it.

Before "not" doing anything just think whether you are troubling yourself by not doing it. If yes, go ahead do it. You will much better.

Minimalism

The more things you have the more things you have to manage.

My working table is never to filled up with.

Keep the relevant things and throw away the unrequired stuff. Yes throw them away.

Apple has stunning desings and they are always so elegant and simple.

Doing one thing at a time.

Whenever I am sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead!

This one is a recent one liner from someone's facebook status. But it works like charm. Whenever you are sad just think of this line and suddenly you will notice a positive vibe instead.

PS: will keep updating this list.

Archiving narcissism

Give me some sunshine

The latest song "Give me some sunshine" from the movie 3 idiots is too catchy. The moment you hear the song you can somewhere relate to the song. Although my life till now now has been totally on my terms, be it the choice of career or the choice of college or the choice of startup. I will never say that "ki bachpan bhi gaya, jawani bhi gayi... ab toh hume jeene do jeene do...".

but still yaar load kis ki life main nahin hota. Load chodo. I Still was thinking ki kyun main is gaane se itna relate kar paata hoon. And the sheer reason was ki hain gaana bahut sacchai se gaaya hain yaar. The music is sooo relaxing and the voice is so simple that you feel drowned in the song. And secondly aspirations kiske nahin hote. This song reminds you all those unachieved things in life.

Life in a metro

Saw the movie again today on TV and fell in love again with it.

The first time I had watched the movie, it soo knocked me out.
True Emotions, shown in such a practical manner are bound to touch your heart.
People struggling to make ends meet often forget the true reason for which they go to work.
This reminds of these lines from munnabahi :

Shaher ki is daud me daud ke karna kya hai?

Jab yehi jeena hai dosto to phir marna kya hai?

Paheli barish me train late hone ki fikr hai

Bhul gaye bhigte hue tahelna kya hai?

Serials ke kirdaaro ka saara haal hai malum

par maa ka haal puchhne ki fursat kaha hai?

Ab ret pe nange pao tahelte kyu nahi?

108 hai chanel phir dil bahelte kyu nahi?

Internet se duniya ke to touch me hai,

lekin pados me kon raheta hai jaante tak nahi.

Mobile, Landline sab ki bharmaar hai,

Lekin jigri dost tak pahuche aise taar kaha hai?

Kab dubte hue suraj ko dekha tha, yaad hai?

Kab jaana tha shaam ka guzarna kya hai?

To Dosto Shaher ki is daud me daud ke karna kya hai

Jab yahi jeena hai to phir Marna kya hai?

And

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Google Chrome love

I am missing the google chrome browser in linux. Yesterday I was in windows and just fell in love with the Google Chrome browser and its themes. Themes in flock are not available for linux. I even tried setting up my development environment in Windows, but Damm!! Aptana and github private repos wont work.

 

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I love to run!!

It feels I've found a passion.
The one that gets the best out me.
The one that thrills me.
Today in the gym, 8Km, 60 minutes and 750 Calories.
Yo Baby!!

View and edit deleted records with acts_as_paranoid

We at intinno use acts_as_paranoid so as not to permanently remove any data from the mysql tables. This also helps in restoring deleted data, if required.

Situation:

In Naarad(our erp solution for coaching institutes) users add teaching logs, which is basically a log book of which teacher taught which subject from what to what time. However your clients employ teachers which come and go. So teachers get added and deleted all the time. But if the teachers are deleted, then the logs refering to them would throw an error , saying the record doesn't exist.

Solution:

If we dont find the record, then try find_with_deleted first. If find with deleted fails, then render nil or blank

Basically instead of using

I now used

and force_find is defined as


Situation:

Ok now I can view the deleted record. But the logs can also be edited. So now the deleted records shoould be edited. But editing a deleted record sounded wierd.

Solution:

But there was a catch. In my case, logs corresponded to dates. So if a record is deleted, then it makes sense to edit its log entries before it was deleted. So in my app subjects had teachers and i defined a new method



Now while assigning teachers to log, all the teachers present on the system at a particular day are fetched.

Note: The above method in the application helper has been extracted out into a plugin. Read the details here.

My Desktop

My Desktop

and I intend it to keep it this way. :)

Happy B'de

Why I hate anything except ruby

Yes I really want to exit!!! you stupid fool.

Anything except rails

Its really difficult for me to do anything that doesn't involve ruby OR rails.  I have a pending work in python which has been procrastinated beyond imagination. Time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. 

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Back after a long time

I had left this blog a long time ago and went for the wordress blog. Then I switched over to my self hosted blog. Wordpess blog was very difficult to update due to the heavy interface. The self managed blog ran really slow due to the dreamhost.com hosting.

Now Finally I'am back and I hope to post more frequently here due to the fact:

I am back to blogspot, from where I started.
Switched to flock and it should easily integrate to the blogspot.

Hope to see u here more frequently. :-)

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This Blog has moved!

In the light of the facts such as:

1. Lot my relatives have discovered this blog and the not only read but also save the posts :(
   
2. Also soon my parents would be stumbling upon it

So I have decided to move to a New Blog, where I can keep my personal posts personal.

New Blog Link: http://romram.wordpress.com

New Blog's RSS feed link: http://romram.wordpress.com/feed/

Bbye Bbye Blogger!

Note: I will not delete this blog, but it will remain inactive!

Intezaar Aitbaaar - awesome song !

I seem to have suddenly fallen in love with this song:

darr yeh lagta hai kya yeh sapana hai
ab jo apana hai kal woh kaha hai
darta dil pooche baar baar - 2
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar itna karu - 2

aansu aate the laut jaate the
lamhon pe lamhen chatpatate the
phir bhi kiya hai intezaar - 2
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar itna karu
kya pyar hai kya hai nahi
maine nahi poocha na
ho tum mere yah ho nahi
maine nahi poocha na
poocha nahi baar baar - 2
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar itna karu - 2

ek din aayega tanha reh jaayega - 2
dost kya dushman kya dhundh na paayega
maula ke saamne kehta reh jaayega
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar kitna karu - 2
intezaar kitna karu
aitbaar kitna karu
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar kitna karu

chhoti raaten hai kitni baaten hai
ab jo aaye ho ab batate hai
thaamon hamein ab ek baar - 2
intezaar aitbaar tumse pyar itna karu...



And yes, yesterday being the last saturday of my stay in Bangy, I went shopping, bought 4 tshirts and a watch. :D

Being here, Doing this.

It has often happened to that I am looking at an article by a famous person, say Matt Cutts, and I wonder how great these people might be at work. And then it strikes me that wait dude, he is at Google, let me check out what he is upto nowadays. This feels Awesome.

Awesome weekend till now!

This weekend has been great so far. For a self proclaimed geek like me... going to some place outside Bangalore seems too much pain. I am very happy in my comfort zone i.e. /home/google/udit. :)
So on Friday night went to Koramangala area where I met Arpit, Dani, Shanks, Veeru and Dahiya. अपने बत्च्मतेस से मिलने मैं मज्जा ही कुछ और आ ता हैं. Then bahut mehnat and phone calls ke baad ek mast restaurant mila and had a good time there. After that went to the place where Arpit was staying i.e. Kala's house. Kala is an awesome person and learned about his various Real Life Orkut Adventures. Quite awesome man.. aisa bhi ho sakta hain kya??? And then finally after so many days watched the movies I wanted to, on Arpit's laptop.

On Saturday morning the HR guys had planned a movie for us, Shreck 3 to be more precise. Actually I don't watch Cartoon Movies but I liked this one. Then I headed back to my comfort zone i.e. /home/google/udit and spent the remaining day understanding things that had confused me since 1985. I Also took someone's Ipod, copied all the songs on my hard disk and then configured a player to play mp3. All this on Ubuntu. Ubuntu actually Rocks!

So now comes Sunday morning and I suddenly want to buy Jeans. Living in Kgp makes you wear the same two pair of jeans you have for your entire life. But now I decided that it was time to get some new ones. So I went to Bangalore Central as suggested by Reddy hunting for some cheap Jeans. Now begins the best part of the weekend. So I reached the third floor, where the jeans corner is and started looking at stuff. Then a Girl came, and said, "Hi, I am a Fashion Analyst[Not sure about the analyst part :)] and can I help you in selecting jeans". She was good looking, but not those bitchy types. She looked as though she was from a middle class family. But She was too Beautiful man. She was one of those shaadi karne layak kudi mannn... and then I started taking all her suggestions... looking at her... or rather staring at her... she smiled and then me too.... the jeans were also good and the fashion analyst was also good and there was a offer of buying two and getting one free and each costs around 900... MAN what more do you need in life... I went looking there for Jeans....got 3 for 2000 bucks... talked with an awesome girl... yaar bahut acchi thi vo... Arpit Jain kahan hain tu... chal tu bhi aaja Jeans khareedte hain... tu try karte rehna and main usse dobara baat kar lunga... so Please kisi ko agara Jeans khareedni hian tu contact me... :D :D

Now back @ /home/google/udit and writing this post, waiting for the pizzas to come and then will start some actual work.

I can still feel her around me man.
YES what a weekend!

Bol na halke halke

This song is very romantic and definitely deserves a space on this page :).

Dhaage tod laao chandani se noor ke
Ghoonghat hi banalo roshini se noor ke
Sharma gai to aagosh mein lo
ho Saaaso se uljhi rahi meri saasein
[Bol Na Halke Halke 2
hooth se halke halke
bol na halke ]2

Aa neend ka sauda karein
Ek khwaab de ek khwaab le
Ek khwaab to aankhon mein hai
Ek chand ke takiye tale
Kitne dino se yeh asmaan bhi
soya nahi hai
Isko sula de...
[Bol Na Halke Halke 2
hooth se halke halke
bol na halke ]2

Umrein lagi kehte hue
do lafaj the ek baat thi
Woh ek din sau saal ka
Sau saal ki woh raat thi
Kaise lage jo chupchap dono
Palpal mein puri sadiyan beetadein

[Bol Na Halke Halke 2
hooth se halke halke
bol na halke ]2

Dhaage tod aalo chandani se noor ke
Ghoonghat hi banalo roshini se noor ke
Sharma gai to aagosh mein lo
ho Saaaso se uljhi rahi meri saasein
[Bol Na Halke Halke 2
hooth se halke halke
bol na halke ]2


The lines in bold are my favorite. This song makes you feel you should be in love.

Music By Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy.
Lyrics By Gulzar.
Performed By Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Mahalaxmi Iyer.
Loved by Many!