9Comments Long time no c..

Some day.. yeah some day when someone says "long time no c" on IM, I wanna reply with -

Really? read this then.. #include "stdio.h"

But I can't.. I can't because of my own rules..

Lets go through our basics first. IM, Instant messaging is build in such a way that we can type only one line at a time...Well, there's a reason behind it.. humans can read only one f*kin line at a time... I hate when people copy paste something in IM. In my case, most of the times, this copy pasted thing is some huge snippet of code.. (huge snippet, is this a valid phrase?)

Hey, can you have a look at this ? DHAM!!
Hey, please check this. DHAM!!
Looks like there's something wrong in this. DHAM!!
Hey, any idea why this is not working? DHAM!!
.. and then I changed my function to this. DHAM!!

now replace DHAM with that "huge snippet" but keep the DHAM sound ringing in your ears.

Taking it to next level, some people write something in between..
//huge code
this is better or this is -
//again huge code.

I takes me like 5-10 mins to find the text in-between...

I really can't.. I won't use IM for debugging.. this is crazy.. one second you are looking at nice lil chat window with text that you know, next thing you have poor lil window cluttered with non-sense code..
Even a smallest bug looks like really crazy, creepy bug in IM. And yet, every time I try resizing my window to fit the length of that code and try to understand it. No need to say I don't understand a thing in it..

So people.. IM is not for sucha things.. may be you have wave for that (yey! found first use of google wave!)
Think about person on the other side... think about your children (huh?), think about poor lil IM window and stop pasting code in chat window...

[Else I'll start pasting wikipedia articles in that window]

7Comments <Music />

Ultimate question I wanna ask today is - How many of you listen to music while coding?


Today I listened to one of the podcast on similar topic. (not while coding..)
They said, if the room you are coding is too noisy then listening to music while coding actually helps concentrating..
And its actually true.. works for me..
Our brain takes chunk of concentration in noisy places rather than coding while listening to music. Reason behind this is pattern recognition. its very hard in case of random noise so takes brain's power to run that algo. :) but if you're listing to song you already heard, it'll not need that much brain power...

My experience says -
* If you are sitting in noisy place - you can hardly concentrate.
* If you are listening to music that you always listen - you can concentrate much better.
* If you are listening to same song over and over again - concentration at its best until you realize you are listening to same song..
* If you are listening to song that you've never heard - concentration is ok, but you really will have to listen to song again to know how good/bad it is..
* If you are listening to audiobook while coding.. waste of time.. you'll hardly code n listen to same chapter when you are free..
* Movie, TV serial somewhere in the vicinity, you'll close aptana n start watching it..
* Sitting in Conference room alone? you'll do whole weeks work in an hour..


Some people prefer White Noise for concentrating.. but that noise irritates me after some time.. :(

What do you guys prefer ?