Monday, December 24, 2007

Tough times

Many times in life, it so happens that when you just begin to feel that everything is falling in place, something goes wrong. Terribly wrong. It has happened to me couple of times in the past. Last Thursday, it started again.

I was very happy with low bug count on my name and because the year end was approaching. I planned to go to my hometown and welcome 2008 with my family. Everything was so nice until I got that phone call.

It was around 7 PM. I was in the office gym. I had just finished with my workout and was about to go to the shower to cool myself down. That's when I heard my phone ringing. It was Rahul (my room-mate). In a very low voice, he said "Can you please come home as soon as possible". He sounded like he was in great pain. I asked him if he was alright. He said he had hurt his leg and he was bleeding. Given Rahul's history, an accident is a fairly regular thing for him. But I somehow felt this time it was bad.

I packed my stuff quickly and started from office. I wasn't getting any vehicle to reach home so I called my landlord and asked him for help. He being a nice person, acted promptly and took Rahul to Apollo Hospital (it's very close to where we stay in Hyderabad). I managed to get a cab and I too reached there by 7:45. He was in the emergency ward. His wound was dressed. We got an X-ray done to see if there was any fracture. Thankfully there wasn't any. We left for home.

Next day, we again came to the hospital to consult the doctor. The doctor said the wound needs to be stitched. They took him to the operation theater. They said the procedure would take half an hour and then he would need to stay in the recovery room for another half an hour to get out of the anesthesia influence. They started the process and it went on for well beyond half an hour. While Rahul was in the operation theater, I kept asking the officials what was happening. They informed me that it was going to be an operation instead of a simple stitching procedure. They also told me that they had to give him a heavy dose of local anesthesia. The operation lasted for around 50 minutes and he had to be in the recovery room for more than 2 hours.

It was very tiring being in a hospital for more than 6 hours where you hardly see any happy faces. All through that time, it was my local friends, Esha, and the rest of my family members who kept calling me and that was a huge support for me.

Next day afternoon, I got to know that my mom wasn't keeping well and she may have to get hospitalized. By evening, she was admitted in the hospital. By then I was completely shaken. Within just 48 hours, everything around me has turned so bad. Though the doctor had said my mom was alright, I couldn't sleep the whole night worrying about her. Next day morning my father told me that she was absolutely fine and there was nothing to worry about.

With god's grace, everything is fine now. Rahul is at home recovering from his injury. My mom is still in the hospital but she is alright now. And I am back to my desk - composing the blogpost and getting ready to kill some bugs :-)

Monday, December 17, 2007

One call at a call center

This is the funniest conversation I have ever heard.

Note:

  1. Requires Microsoft Silverlight
  2. You need to know Marathi to understand this

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Re-Shuffle

About 6 years back when I was in college, I was a C++ enthusiast and I never thought anything could be better or beyond C++.

It was during those days when I wrote a version of Shuffle (a very popular tile game) using MFC. I don't have the source code now. But as far as I remember, it was very complex for me at that time and it took me almost a week to code it.

Now, my world has evolved and I write code for a better platform - .net

Today evening at about 6 PM, a though crossed my mind - Why not rewrite Shuffle using C#? As I had some time with me, I went ahead and wrote it only this time with a better and extensible design.

As I am writing this post, it is 8:20 PM and I am done with a basic version of Shuffle which is an exact replica of the MFC version that I had written earlier.

Here is a Screen Print of Shuffle:

Shuffle

Presently, it includes simple Numbered tiles based game. But I intend to add Image tiles as well.

Click here to download it.

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NOTE: The source-code isn't available for download as of now. I will make it available once I am done with Image Tiles as well.

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UPDATE:

The source code is now available for download. I haven't implemented Image Tiles yet. And I don't think I will be doing it anytime soon. If you are very keen on Image Tiles, go ahead and modify the source code. I made a couple of fixes to the code and added comments before releasing it for download.