Being in bench is the time to learn.

People in IT industry sometimes may run out of projects and will eventually be in a virtual project called "The Bench". I have been in bench for the past few months.
At first i was a bit worried about my career, but then I just thought being in bench just means I cannot be billed for a client at present. That's only for a small period of time. We have to be hopeful that we will be assigned to a project in the coming days.
And that doesn't mean that you can just relax, have coffee , eat your lunch and go home. The time you are given here is the time to learn new things which you might not even think of while working in a project. It need not be technical, you can learn about new tools being used by the developers, you can try to followup the marketing strategies of companies, you can have a peep into a different domain of work.
Time, the fourth dimension is always precious in life.

Loads of OSS

Whether we use it or not, open source softwares and libraries have become an active part in the industry. You will find at least one open source software in any category you ask for.

Starting with
OS - Linux, Solaris follows it and many more that can be list
Office suites - Open Office, GNOME Office(Abiword,Gnumeric etc), KOffice and more
Browser and mail clients - Firefox, Mozilla suite, Thunderbird, K-Meleon....
Development Environments - Eclipse, Netbeans, Codeblocks, KDevelop, Anjuta, DevCpp...
Web Servers - Apache, Lighttpd...
Editors - Vim, Emacs, PSPad, Notepad++, Pnotepad, JEdit, RJTextEd, Scite, Jext,...
Databases - Firebird, MySQL, Sqlite, PostgreSQL...

C and C++ Libraries
GUI - GTK, FLTK, Fox toolkit, Ultimate++, WxWidgets, IUP....
General Purpose - Boost, PTypes, STLPort...

Java Libraries and softwares
GUI - SWT, Thinlet ...
Document converters and renderers - iText(PDF), POI(MS Office documents)...
Application Servers - Tomcat, Geronimo, JBoss, Jetty....
Web Frameworks - Struts, Tapestry, Cocoon, WebOnSwing, ...
ORMs - Hibernate, iBatis, SimpleORM, jPox, Mr. Persister...

The list goes on and i cant list whole list here and i dont remember everything too.
Today every programmer does use an open source library or software everyday and in few years to come, i think even the others would also go for Open source tools and software which are available for free with at least 90% of the functionalities in commercial products.

It has already begun from the governments of the developing nations to support OSS.
Day by day more and more Linux distros are coming out and they are much more user friendlier than they were. http://distrowatch.com
So what i would like to say is that the OSS era has begun and growing faster than ever. Let us support it.

Today's highlights

As usual city traffic was overflowing; i rushed over and reached my office at around 11:00.
I was struggling with the current assignment given by my lead for the past 4 days. So I was desperately determined to make sure that i finish it off at least by end of the day.
Something made me feel better today; it was the fortune section in orkut. It read "Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded". It felt good when i read it and I started my work.

I have been debugging the program for the past four days and i couldn't find the exact location of the problem. But today i felt comfortable with placing the breakpoints at proper locations and i found the problem and solved it. I feel that hearing or listening or reading something that makes you feel better will also make you think far better than you would expect. For example listening to your favorite music in the morning could be a moral booster.
I feel good listening to music while driving bike, bcoz the rhythm makes me drive in a rhythm. But don't try it, its dangerous to follow Maddy's(Madhavan) style.

Lycan kush hua

I love to think fictitiously

Don't mistake me for having named my blog such fictitiously. I just wanted to attract people like me(who like fiction). Blogs without visitors and blogs without comments are not blogs, its a mere personal diary.
Date : 27 Aug 2006

Started logging my life ...........................................