Been whiling away the time...: (

Had a break in my study plan !! Been whiling away the time actually. One thing is the work Iam being asked to do is bugging. Not sense in working on! But then you just cant survive on air :( (Unfortunately !!) !!


Have to start on with regular expressions in perl. And have to catch up on the Unix reading that I was doing also !
maybe will start up with it. Ever felt like becoming invisible and seeing how people do their work for 30 odd years and still find the motivation to continue. It cannot be just financial security !! Maybe I should talk to some factory workers and find out what keeps them goin ? :)

Unix Programming Environment !

Been laid low by that obnoxious thing called viral fever. If only happiness was a virus :( !!

Anway one good thing about being laid low, was that i could read up "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kerninghan and Pike. And this is a must read book, the excercises are meant to really oil your grey cells.

Finished 3 and half chapters in two days :) !! A few good things that I learnt :
: directories are files, and the content of these files are the files and directories that are present under it. More than just the contents, it also contains the i-name or inode of the files. So remember that pesky link number for each file when we do a ls -l. Well that link is the link from the directory to the file !!

: using shell builtins are always faster than commands. For e.g. shift, cp doesnt change the owner and permissions of the output file.
|| is much more faster than the corresponding if condition.

: awk and sed are coooool, but its gonna take an awfully long time for me to learn these "tools"

Well others I dont remember that well. But some of the shell programs are cool and very suprising in terms of simplicity. You need a particular mindset to do these things ! And i seriosly lack that mindset I guess !!

Will keep updating this page. I have perl to catch up on now.

ciao !!

Bullet Club Meeting, Perl e.t.c...

My plans for continuing with Perl did not work out today ! Sriram had come down in the morning and went to meet him. Then was roaming arnd till evening. Then went for the bullet club meeting and ultimately got back here.
Did a bit of hashes today and left it at that. Maybe will start it out tomorrow.
Want to do a bit of C now.

As for languages that can be used for creating CGI applications: C, C++ and JAVA, plus many more.. So why perl ? maybe i will know as i move on. The obvious answer is that perl is a scripting language ! hmm.. or maybe i am yet inexperienced and havent seen an instance of extreme data processing required by a web page. I guess the more apt reason would be the later ;)...

Anyway enough for today then....

Perl and CGI....

Yesterday was spent in learning the ropes of perl cgi. Once you start learning something and then look back at the times you were wondering what all this greek and gibberish were, u suddenly feel foolish :) !! But dont get me wrong its a great feeling.

CGI standards is actually one of the outdated standards that is present. There are others like JSP's, .NET e.t.c which are more faster and powerful.
The whole setup on CGI can be envisaged as a controller which allows users to communicate with the server. What users see is an html page. This is the interface for them to talk to the server. The users will input some data through the form (html page). This data is then grouped as key-value pairs and sent to the server. The CGI standard has got certain environment values through which these key and values can read and processed. The back end processing is done by Perl. (And Iam assuming that this is possible with other languages also. Which languages ? I do not know now, but maybe I will have something to update with tomorrow !)
Supposes there are 100 users accessing that form, then for CGI, there will be that many instances !! (Yes !!) Consider the same scenario in case of JSP. In this case, there will still be only one instance, which timeshares the info provided by the user with the server !!

In spite of this why do peopel still use CGI ? Iam not sure. Maybe its the compatibility with languages like Perl. Or maybe It was because of legacy considerations !! Maybe I should look into that and see if anything interesting comes up or not .

Perl ! Why didnt I do this before....

Iam about to be released from my present project. As per plans that were proposed when I joined the project, I should have been released last december!! Finaly a year later, I am to be released around middle of January,2005 (touchwood!!).
Till now I have never been interested in going onsite or anything, but in TCS and as per the latest promotion policy, the only way you are going to make some money is to go onsite and so that s what Iam trying to do.
My resume has been sent to one project based in Australia. It has got a perl requirement. My knowledge in Perl is okay. Have started to brush it up from today. Not sure whether the assignment will materialise or not, but whaterver I alwasy wanted to learn Perl ;) !

I have three basic reasons behind blogging. Become a competent bullet owner, a good photographer and a linux guru !! At the moment Iam nowhere near there. And Iam really anxious to see where I would end up a year from now !!
Hopefully this blog would be a black and white proof of what I wil be by then :D

ciao !!!