Resilient by compulsion, not by choice

Blasts. Mumbai Blasts. Mumbai Blasts 2008.

Culprits - Our home grown, duely elected, good-for-nothing parasite class which believes only in taking and never giving back to the people who they are supposed to be serving.

Sufferers - We, the people of India minus the parasites.

Most of the intelligence, security, police force is occupied the most,  round the clock for these so called government servants. So much so that a similar terrorist attack on them while in Parliament was successfully averted. Believe me, if terrorists wound have been successfull in their mission, I would have felt sad and sorry only for the Parliament building and noone else. Alas, they were saved, went unscathed and continue to serve or better harm us in their own selfish ways. 

Patil immaculately dressed in different attires amidst public appearances in the wake of blasts uttering the same rote, another Patil calling the shameful siege of Mumbai by 10 terrorists for  3 consecutive days as a minor incident, Deshmukh trying to capitalise this fateful situation by helping out Bollywood and his own son, Kerala CM badmouthing the martyr Major Unikrishnan's family overlooking his own mistake and their grief and sacrifice and so on and so forth.

No end to this list of anecdotes from our non-performing, insensitive and heartless beaurocrats.

One thing is very clear, STOP expecting anything from our politicians.

Long time back we stopped expecting primary needs of daily life like sufficient water, enough power supply, clean air,home for all. 

Then we stopped expecting that they will help us in growing economically as a nation, India Inc. took the task in their hands, at the very least expecting politico to be non-interfering.

NOW, lets stop expecting them to give us our absolute fundamental right to life. Privatise everything related to the security of the nation. Abolish the Home Ministry and lets place the responsibility of a billion lives in the capable hands of some great leader of India Inc. like Ratan Tata or Narayan Murthy. 

Life has really become dirt cheap in this great nation of ours which was supposed to be the next Superpower. 

How can India strive to achieve superpowerdom till we know we are going to see the end of this day without any fear of a terrorist assault accompanying us to our stations, market places, hotels, cafes and even inside our homes ?

Nursery Admissions Saga

I sometimes wonder why Ms (K)Ekta Kapoor doesnt take any inspiration from the Nursery admissions embroglio going on in this Dilli di sardi. 

Nursery admissions or the litmus test for parents to show how effective is their parenting in terms of actions,sacrifice,feelings,monitary power,contacts and what not. This power packed subject has all the essential ingrediants of a pot-boiler.

Points,points,points. Lot of points if you have a girl child, sibling in a school, parents as alumini from a school, you are unhappily married (meaning single/divorcee), belong to minority. But God forbid if you have a first born boy child and you are a happily married hindu couple, then forget about getting your child admitted to a good school. 

Newspapers, online websites, discussion forums, playschools, TV, radio all have the info and sympathetic eye and ear about this unique Delhi feature. However, the eternal confusion between school authorities and parents persists year after year.

Confusion around form dates, submission dates, age criteria, point system, documents, fees structure, school branch etc etc.

The biggest sliver lining in this dark cloud is that the kid is spared from the whole admission agony. Oblivion of the trying circumstances that her parents are going through, the child can enjoy some more time of her precious, innocent childhood which will be lost pretty soon, once she enters the big school which her parents have been dying to get her admitted to.

That is the sole good thing which has come out of this exercise of forming a uniform, simplistic approach to nursery admissions.Meaning, all this committee decisions enforcement and rollback has added more to the prevailing admissions turmoil BUT I hail it for the one big positive outcome that poor child doesnt have to go through all the interactions (aka interviews). Let the kids be kids.Dont rob them of their childhood.

Another point to note here is that Delhi is still much better with lot of active involvement of news channels, high court directives, media people. On the other side, if you see Gurgaon's situation, its a jundle raj there. Where every nukkad ka school, adding an International tag to its name, thinks that it can take you for a good financial ride. With pathetic school conditions, minimum they charge for the admission form is Rs 500 and school fees touching the roof.

I must say, another big advantage of living in Delhi, schools are not taking parents for a ride, there genuinly is lot of confusion and hopefully the whole process would get streamlined in next 2-3 years. Till then, dear parents, pull up your socks and get, set, go to win the race for the best school.

Delhi Assembly Elections 2008

While addressing an election rally in Delhi ahead of assembly elections 2008, Mayawati very generously promised to bring Delhi at par with UP if BSP wins. Actually, hold on to your laugh for yet another similar joke by our greatest comedian born politician Shri Lalu Prasad, the Queen maker of Bihar.

So the joke goes like this - 

Once Singapore PM offered Mr. Lalu to give him Bihar and he will turn it into Singapore in 1 month. To this our esteemed Mr Lalu retorted back in his tit-for-tat tone - 

Give me Singapore and I will turn it to Bihar in just 1 week.

So Ms Mayawati, pls dont threaten us with your such offers. Thanks, but no thanks. 

We are very happily struggling in our own Delhi. Happily because we have many flyovers, underpasses, our own metro etc etc. Struggling ofcourse because Women safety in Delhi is still the biggest issue here which no political party appears to be interested in resolving. Basic amenities like 24 hr availability of water and electricity is still an election promise only (I am afraid it will continue to be so for God knows how many years). Poor Yamuna continues to suffer election after election. With the bomb blasts becoming regular feature, right to life seems and sounds quite elusive.

Amusingly, party workers do morning rounds in each colony in the name of door-to-door campaigning- touching feet of elders, namasteji rounds, hugging rounds, bhaiyya-bhabhiji rounds, so-and-so-pe-mohar-lagaye rounds. It really would be nice to see if they ever engaged in door-to-door enquiry and redressal of commom man's woes. 

Anyways, whenever the upliftment of our politico happens (forget upliftment of SC/STs, dalits etc etc), till then lets become more sensible and vote with all our eyes and ears wide open.

Few Useful Web Apps

Few useful URLs that I have come across in past few days -

• Remember the Milk      (The oh so famous ToDo List app)
• Memiary                       (Concise Personal Diary with bullets and not paragraphs)
• Syncplicity                    (Data storage and sharing site)

Will keep appending to this list....

DB Table name != pluralize(model name)

 Rails has the following convention -

 The model class names will be automatically mapped to tables with pluralized class names.

 For instance, MyBlogZone model will be mapped to the table name my_blog_zones.

 Now, for some reason, we dont want that automatic mapping to happen and we want the class to map to our legacy db table or another meaningful name, we can override the Rails convention like this -

1. Add in config\environment.rb 

    ActiveRecord::Base.pluralize_table_names = false

2. Add in your model class definition

     class MyBlogZone &lt ActiveRecord::Base

        set_table_name "my_globe"

     end

Basically, here we would be using configuration over convention, contrary to the Rails mantra.

In short, Rails provides the flexibility to go either ways :)

Scaffolding in Rails 2.0

Pre Rails 2.0, Scaffolding was much more flexible and dynamic.
With Rails 2.0, you cant do the following

• selectively scaffold a model /controller / migration.
• generate model and controller with different names via a single scaffold command.

Naturally, there was a big furor regarding scaffold philosophy change. Check out this scaffold discussion here.

The post Rails 2.0 era has scaffold working like this , basically all-in-one command, compact and rigid -
> ruby script\generate scaffold product

- The above command generates model, migration, controller, view and view helpers, all at one go. However, do remember to give the db columns of the product table in the scaffold command else the skelton gets generated for a non-attribute table/model which effectively doesnt serve any purpose. So here you go -

> ruby script\generate scaffold product name:string, category:string, price:float

How to figure out pre-installed ROR versions on a machine

Just in case, you are handed an already configured machine, complete with ROR setup.

To save some noise pollution asking people around for ROR environment/versions in your pre-configured machine :),

you are better off using the following command -

> ruby script\about

Would return something like this -

About your application's environment

Ruby version 1.8.6 (i386-mswin32)

RubyGems version 1.1.1

Rails version 2.0.2

Active Record version 2.0.2

Action Pack version 2.0.2

Active Resource version 2.0.2

Action Mailer version 2.0.2

Active Support version 2.0.2

Edge Rails revision 798

Application root C:/workspace/nr

Environment development

Database adapter mysql

• You can also view individual versions like

> ruby -v

> gem --version