Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

I love Amon Amarth. Their album – With Oden on our side – is my favorite album of all time. And there would be no way in hell I would miss them – an off-mainstream swedish outfit – performing in India!

I’d purchased a large (40”) flag bearing the cover of the “With Oden on our side” Album a few months ago. It adorned my hostel room wall next to my bed. (Hence I lived literally “With Oden on my side”.) I took it back home and painstakingly stiched and duct-taped it onto a eleven foot pole so I could raise the flag and fly it high!

And here is the result (look for the flag in the first minute or so):

Some bloke even mentioned it somewhere online:

“Someone in the crowd had mercifully brought an Amarth flag that flew high and proud” [source]

Overall the concert was absolutely mindblowing! I never expected to see these guys perform anytime unless I went to some european place. My only regret was that the show ended too early because the Police closed the concert as nothing can run after 10 around here. They couldn’t even play their crowd-pleasing hit – “Pursuit of Vikings”. I felt that the other opening bands and “Textures” (who played before them) got too much time.

The exact same thing happened when Megadeth came and performed – Machine Head could play a full setlist leaving the main act short and the audience desperately wanting. I just hope this encourages show organizers to avoid trying to get a “woodstock” like experience by cramming many bands in and realizing most people just come in to watch one or two famous bands.

Either way, it was one of the most awesome nights of my life. I had seen Amon Amarth. Nothing else would’ve mattered.

So I’ve been quiet over here because I’ve been awfully busy off late. One of the things occupying my time was preperation for the WTMS Annual Production. WTMS is an society that plays music inside the institute. I had the honor of being one of the three Governors of the society this year, which meant a lot of work over the past few weeks.

The show was great. We experimented with a new sound technician which didn’t go too well. But the crowd was nice, the music was good and the finale was explosive. I asked my friend Anutosh to photograph the event and some of the photographs were great, and I thought I’d share some here. Thanks to my friend and depmate Karthik Prabhu for taking photographs as well(he’s keeping the best pics from me, to edit and polish, so you might get a follow-up post).

A little bit of history now. Back in first year, when we really didn’t play anything, me and two very good friends – Ved and DC – spent more time fantasizing about stage antics and imaginary bands and songlists (trivia: we still call ourselves “Ved’s Imaginary Band” or VIB even when we perform on stage), than we did actually playing anything.

One of the things we most wanted to do is to line up next to each other, point the fretboard at the audience, not unlike the thing very characteristic of Iron Maiden. Something like this:

And four years later – lo and behold:

FYI, that’s me on the left of the image. With my best friend Ved in the middle. Vibhav – on the right – was supposed to line up as well, but he stuck to where he was prolly due to the fear of messing up the “Dance of Death” lick. We were like “clean playing be damned! it’s the photo op that counts”. In his defence his solo came out great!

Wait… Something’s not right. DC was supposed to be along with us as well. Kindof difficult since DC plays keyboards (he’s a “synthie” as they call ‘em down here). Thankfully, his E-mu XBoard 49 Midi controller keyboard comes into the rescue.

Errr…. success?

The show closed with local hero and grade-A-nice-guy Ankit “Godwa” Prasad playing a _perfect_ rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” – the long extended Pulse Live version. We even projected a video of the concert in the background.

Anyways, the show was great. I was thoroughly exhausted at the end of it. An entire day of setting up several thousand watts worth of sound, setting patches and playing with some of the most talented people I’ve met in my life. And lie down on a stage – just because I could. (image – I’m in the blue shirt, DC’s in black)

Thanks to everyone who came! Hopefully I’ll get to play at Kharagpur once more before I graduate. Until then!

Follow me down, to the valley below. They were arriving somewhere, but not here, but not anymore! Porcupine Tree, the progressive rock band will be headlining Mood Indigo, the IIT Mumbai cultural fest on 21st December. Their website confirms that they will be playing their final show at Mumbai!

Needless to say, I’m so going to be there! I absolutely love their last three albums, and their new album “the incident” is due a week from now. Hopefully, they’ll play some of their more popular songs along with material from the new album.

I wrote a small addin last evening for all the beautiful MonoDevelop users. This allows you to send your code (either the whole file or a selection) to PasteBin.com from right inside the IDE.

Here’s a quick screenshot:

This is the first of many text-editor productivity centric addins I hope to release in the future. You can find the code here: http://github.com/ninjagod/MonoDevelop.EditorTools/tree/master. The code is under the MIT/X11 license.

To build, check out MonoDevelop.EditorTools into extras, and build against a built copy of MonoDevelop (and make sure that the newer version of the assemblies are present in your search path). This has been tested against trunk. It builds an addin directly into main/build/addins. I hope to merge this into the MonoDevelop trunk though it’s a really really small feature.

Still to be finxed: 1. The “Copy link” button does not work because I don’t know how to use the clipboard through C#. 2. I need to retrieve the user’s name from the settings 3. I need to remember things like subdomain, name, etc and load them up from a PropertyBag.

And the elusive download link: PasteBinHelper.dll [via] (You can put this in the md-trunk/main/build/Addins/MonoDevelop.EditorTools/PasteBinHelper.dll) and it should work. Since the Addin specifically requests assemblies of version 2.1.0 (trunk), it might not work with 2.0 (don’t let that stop you from trying though)

Sometime in late May, I embarked upon a project to extend MonoDevelop, an open-source C# IDE, to give it Task-context functionality and integration with Bug-trackers, not unlike what Eclipse’s Mylyn provides.

7630 lines of code, and several times my bodyweight in Coffee later, there’s something to show for my work. This may be the end of the program, but I am going to continue working on this for several months to come. After some more testing, I’ll release a very small preview version with some of the unstable/experimental features phased out on the MonoDevelop mailing lists. It’s still far, far, far from complete. It needs several months of work before I’m happy with what it can do, but the basic skeleton is starting to take shape, allowing me to focus more on features rather than worry about the backend.

I had several issues during the program – primarily the fact that I was interning at a company and had to do this on evenings, and weekends – which became extremely tiring. Add to that, the horrid Bangalore traffic, two hour commutes, etc, it became pretty hard. Moving closer to the office with a relative provided some respite. While it would’ve been ideal to hack on my code in the evenings at the office, I couldn’t for legal reasons, so I would hang out at a friend’s place nearby and occasionally work at his place.

My mentor, Michael Hutchinson was so overwhelmingly helpful, it was almost a little embarrassing. When he was unavailable for sometime in the middle, I almost started panicking; it’s really not easy wrestling with such a huge codebase. The other folks over at #monodevelop were incredibly helpful and patient as well. There was one time when I spent two weeks on the backend trying to refactor the code over from a serialization-based storage system to a Database storage system, because the former wouldn’t work because of some circular-dependency constraints. Thanks to some help from the guys on the channel, I realized my woes can be cured by a simple API call I didn’t know about, and thus threw away two weeks worth of work, and moved things back to the old backend. (though in the long run the database would’ve been excruciatingly painful to work with)

Anyways, I need to do some more housekeeping, add some comments here and there and maybe an easter egg or two.

Sneak preview

Again, this is a very early version and will be subject to massive changes. I will write again soon describing what it’s all about.