Perpetually Perplexed

Unlimited internet access on your phone  - is it a good thing or a bad thing? Well depends on how you use it. I am not going to start a lecture now like moms and dads are supposed to do. I will just tell you my experience. For many years I hardly ever used internet on my phones. Wifi connection was present. But why would you use it? Only time I used mobile internet was for testing my programs and for podcast addict - the downloaded podcasts were my sleeping pills.  Mobile internet I would try now and then and would be scared to death by the mobile currency they would gobble. It took me a long time for me to realize that the kids who are always "connected" using phones, use internet packs.  Next I tried using these internet packs - either they will be too expensive or valid for something like a day.  All these changed when I got Jio. ( Let me clarify. I am not a brand ambassador of Reliance.)  I struggled a lot to get SIM. After many visits to reliance d...

My C blog has only 97 published posts where as this has 1000+ posts. So I am always perplexed! Yesterday my perpl - leave it, my confusion was about money situation. Some countries face shortage of food, due to war or some natural calamity etc some times. Some other times people face shortage of money due to recession, drought and so on. What do we have here now. We have money, but we don't have money. Some thing to ponder about!!

I had written in an earlier post that HE is omnipresent. Or at least that is the title he likes to call himself. But now I am having doubts. If God were present, would he let our country become so chaotic? A chaotic as Arnab's show? Would he let the common man and common woman be afraid even to breathe? Would he let kindness, morality and sympathy vanish from this earth? Would he let the wide spread hatred to flourish every where on this earth? Is he becoming from omni-present to omni-absent. Or has he migrated to another universe, so that he can have a little peace and quiet

People here and every where else are turning very very cruel - if I may use that word. If they feel threatened, questioned, or inconvenienced in any way, they will try all kinds of language on the other party. More so about women. During Kaveri riots people would call very ugly names to TN chief minister. Not only politicians, even common women are not saved from these ugly words. And neighbors do that very frequently. Let us see a case. Let us say some one says a that the "character" of such and such woman is not good. Do you believe them? Of course, you will. You say "how can there be smoke without fire". You also say "Why does she act so nervous". Or "Look how bold she is. She must be really bad". You say "Why is she hiding in the house? Why is she afraid?" Or you will say "Where does she go every day? What does she do?". You say "Everyone is talking about her. It must be true". You say "She is keeping q...

Thought I will write some thing in android blog. But no, I can not frame words around the post. So it is better to babble/ramble  here. Regex - Stands for regular expressions. Used in programming languages and scripts for pattern matching of strings. Efficient and ugly. And very very very difficult. I tried the entire morning to write an expression which gobbles all the text between let us say abc and def. Read stack overflow, blogger posts. Watched youtube videos. I was not getting what I wanted. And I did not have time and patience to learn everything. Because it is very complex. If you have mastered regex, kudos to you. Then I wrote my own tester, a small android activity which lets you enter text and regex and does pattern matching. ( I realized it is long time since I designed a layout file) After an hour or so I finally got the result. (abc).*?(def). Quite simple. Isn't it. So back to gobbling of text in my actual program. And gobble it did not. So how come it worked...

Finally, at last I have published the update to memory app. Well this certainly is a good app for keeping your brain active. There are 4 games in the app. One is for face memory. One is classic cards memory and the other two are patterns memory and Simon. Simon is one game I am fond of.  The game has 4 colored buttons which glow in a sequence. And each of these produces a unique sound. You need to remember the sequence and repeat it. May be because of music notes, it appeals to me. I tried adding some tabla sequences instead of the usual saa, re, ga etc. But it was not sounding good. And there were some glitches in face memory too. Initially I added some politicians and authors faces. Then was worried about any copy right issue. Finally I settled for cartoon faces. So they may not be cute or pretty.  In faces game, you will see a set of faces and then one face is replaced. You need to identify the changed face. What are you waiting for download the app tod...

Screen orientation is an important aspect of mobile devices. In earlier devices, it did not matter. Whether you held your phone straight or rotated, the screen would always be really small. Now in the days of 5, 6 inch screens and phablets, your portrait and landscape orientation makes a lot of difference. You can read much longer lines in landscape, but fewer lines before you have to scroll. Now when you rotate the screen, the contents of the screen rotate. Not happening in your phone? You need to pull down the menu from top of mobile screen. The same menu, used to put phones in silent mode. Yes, that menu has an option for automatic screen rotation. You should enable it. You did not know that? Your child/grand child will be very angry when teaching you mobile. But once you enable auto rotation, you have another problem. You are watching some Ted video. On the bed. Either because you want to put yourself to sleep or you feel you are genius if you watch youtube videos instead of...