Kidney Stones

Had my first kidney stone this week and I have to say it hurt like hell! Luckily the hospital was nearby and they gave me all sorts of fun drugs to mute the pain. The whole ordeal took 6 hours, which I hope to never have to experience again.

For me, this was just sharp reminder that I need to take care of my health. So I joined a gym and hope to be a regular from now on. After my second day of swimming and exercise, I must say I feel great!

Counting lines of code

I wanted to count the lines of code for a project I was working on and realized that it can be done with some simple regexp and commands. Thought I'd share:

find dir -type f | egrep "(\.xml|\.java|\.jsp|\.tag|\.sql|\.html|\.tld|\.css)$" | xargs cat | egrep -v "^[\s\t]*$" | wc -l


I was surprised that there are companies that sell software to do the above. God I hate over engineering

When The Long Tail Wags The Dog

Came across this essay When The Long Tail Wags The Dog.... Found it interesting and generally agree with the ideas proposed. General purpose systems enable things to be huge and can hit unintended sweet spots, but there is a fine line between good general and overly complex general.. This is another important factor for determining the success of things too... Achieving both simplicity and generality in a single system is hard and achieving both requires a lot of discipline and iteration... As Galls Law describes, general systems always need to evolve from simple ones..