Dropped points by us and them (weekly updated list)

Note: I have now discontinued updating this table. There have been so many points dropped that it is pointless to find any logic in this exercise. However, Man Utd is still unbeaten in the league, even after playing like crap for most of the season. Only Vidic's defensive gladiatorness is saving our asses. Yeah, I just coined that word. Fits our captain invincible aptly, doesn't it?

Manchester United
-------------------
Draw v Fulham (Away) - 2 points
Draw v Everton (Away) - 2 points
Draw v Bolton (Away) - 2 points
Draw v Sunderland (Away) - 2 points
Draw v West Brom (Home) - 2 points
Draw v Man City (Away) - 2 points
Draw v Aston Villa (Away) - 2 points

Chelsea
--------
Lost v Man City (Away) - 3 points
Draw v Aston Villa (Away) - 2 points
Lost v Liverpool (Away) - 3 points
Lost v Sunderland (Home) - 3 points
Lost v Birmingham (Away) - 3 points
Draw v Newcastle (Away) - 2 points

Quotes from the Rooney situation

"To suggest Wayne Rooney will be sold in January is nonsense'' - a United spokesman on Sunday, October 17.


"I was in the office on August 14 and David (Gill, chief executive) phoned me to say (Rooney) wasn't signing a contract. I was dumbfounded. Only months before he was saying he was at the greatest club in the world. I asked to have a meeting with the boy. He reiterated what his agent said, that he wanted to go'' - United manager Sir Alex Ferguson on Tuesday, October 19.

Google India Music Search

Impressive step taken by Google India. What defines India better than Bollywood music? And what do Indians use to find songs online? Answering these questions, the nice folks at Google India have announced Hindi Music Search. Its a win win for all. People continue using Google, the content providers are SaReGaMa, In.com and Saavn. Google must be giving a percentage of revenue generated from the traffic to these content partners to keep them happy.

Either way, most significantly, its a much needed tool for Indian music lovers, and almost guaranteed to be a hit.

To make it better, we would like to see a Pandora way of discovering similar music. Looking forward to it!

Rooney staying!

Wow, what a crazy world we live in! After the agony and controversy over the last week, we learn today that Rooney has executed the mother of all U-turns and signed a 5 year deal with the club. I would like to postulate the events that led up to this conclusion. There are many theories out there, and none of them can be confirmed in any way simply because WE DON'T KNOW ENOUGH. I have some realistic and some utterly insane theories in mind, which I will post soon, one by one. Watch this space.

Rooney Wants Out

Wow, who would have thought Rooney would want to quit Man Utd ever. He is a future captain, kissed the badge a million times, and for most English footballers, Man Utd is as good as it gets. A club which looks after its players, which can give you everything you would dream of, except for sunny weather of course. It would be a major disappointment to see him leave. But I already feel like we are ready to move on.

Manchester United vs West Brom

Can't believe it. Yet another draw after cruising in a comfortable position. Its unreal that United has become so poor at killing games off. 2 goals up, conceded 2 freak goals and then do nothing about it. Ok, its understandable that those 2 goals weren't due to West Brom's creative genius but down to a misfortunate deflection from Evra and a howler from Van Der Sar. However, the old United would kick on from there and bombard the opposition with attack after attack and score any which way possible. Not this United side though.

Fun at Oracle

Yesterday during our team meeting, my manager's manager (Faz) was asked by a senior applications engineer in our team (Sudhir), that for how many years should a laptop be used ideally before replacement.
Faz: At Oracle? Till you die. Either you, or your laptop has to terminate.
It was so funny I was laughing in bursts throughout the meeting, way after everyone else had stopped laughing!

Found my next phone(?)

I definitely want to get my hands on the Samsung Focus for AT&T. Its a soon-to-be-launched Windows Phone 7 device. Not the best that was announced at the launch event 3 days ago (that would be the HTC HD7), but I am not going to part with my beloved AT&T. Check out the phone over here

It would be cool to get my hands on it as soon as it is launched on Nov 8. The pride of owning one of the first models will be awesome! (short lived, but awesome all the same!) Everybody has iPhones, this will be something different.

Proof of Android's increasing popularity

Source: Engadget

Over the last 6 months, Android has gradually crept up on the powerhouses of RIM and Apple, and managed to cross them this August. Definitely a sign of changing times. At least until Apple comes up with a new iPhone and normalcy is restored.

Having said that, development for Android seems a lot more natural than that for iPhone. Everybody knows Java, while Objective C needs to be learned. I am going to dabble into mobile development a bit soon. Will have more opinions then.

Ryan Giggs: A rare breed of footballer

They just don't make them like him anymore. One club man, football above everything else, total focus on fitness, still hungry for more success. In a day and age where footballers (Rooney, Crouch, Terry...) are sleeping around left right and center, Giggs has managed to have a great life and never been in the news for any wrong reasons. At the ridiculously old age of 37, he is still kicking on and Sir Alex continues to rely on him from time to time to produce some magic on the wing.

Great interview in the Guardian: Ryan Giggs - Nice guy finishes first

The worrying debt situation

Manchester City posted a huge loss recently. So much so, that the salaries that they are giving out to their players is exceeding their total revenue. Chelsea posted a record loss when Roman Abramovich took over in 2004. However, the point to be noted here is, both Man City and Chelsea have owners who are shelling out from their own pockets. They are not taking money out of the club for saving their other businesses. The Glazers are doing that to Man Utd though.

You can soon start accepting credit card payments

Its one of those ideas which make you wonder how on earth no one has thought of it till now, how come I have never thought about it?! A company called Square (started by one of the co-founders of Twitter) has made this a reality. You can turn your iPhone, iPad or any mobile device which can run their app into a credit card accepting gizmo. If you have the card number, you can type it in manually, or you can swipe their card through a small square shaped reader which snaps onto the phone's headphone jack, of all places. Want to "square" your debt with your friend? No need for Billmonk and tedious bank transfers anymore, just swipe it through!

David Pogue on NYTimes has more.

To be posted next

Rooney's piss poor form, Valencia's horrific injury, draw against Rangers. Its been a difficult few days for United. Only a cracking display against Liverpool can heal the wounds now!

Will put up a compilation of OOCP-related interview questions soon. Also, will post some notes I have taken about sorting algorithms and time complexities.

Rooney - Oh dear...

Some tabloid newspapers in the UK have revealed that our Wazza committed some serious adultery by banging a bunch of prostitutes while his wife Coleen was pregnant with their baby boy. These allegations have not been denied by the Rooney camp yet (its been about 2 weeks now), so its pretty clear that there might be some truth to the story. Looks like we found the reason why our super striker was banging in goals left, right and center last season eh?

static keyword - a homonym if there ever was one

As much as it is useful, the static keyword has many different meanings within and across different programming languages. If not for anyone else, I want to demystify it once and for all, so that I never have to google it again!

Upcoming posts

Just making a note of what I am going to blog about next. There will be one post about static methods and static variables, clarifying them once and for all. I will look into how they behave differently in Java and in C (you cannot have static variables inside methods (static or otherwise) in Java. They can only be class variables, if I understand correctly. Again, this needs to be looked into.

The second Java related post is going to be a real short one about casting a variable from one data type to its super class data type. This is pretty straightforward if you think about it for a couple of minutes, but I recently tackled this problem at work and its fresh in my mind.

As far as Manchester United is concerned, one thing has been playing on my mind a lot recently. Our transfer strategy. Scott the Red (therepublikofmancunia.com) had a great post about the whole Ozil saga recently. Will type a few words about it myself soon.

Manchester United vs Newcastle United

My team started the 2010/2011 Barclays Premier League season today against Newcastle United. The starting lineup was as a fan would want it to be...4-4-2 formation, with Rooney and Berbatov up top. Rooney is still finding his killer touch and has gone an astonishing 13 games without scoring for club and country. He did manage to hold up the ball as well as ever, passing it out wide to Valencia and then bursting into the box to receive the cross. His unselfishness (or as Martin Tyler commented, his low self confidence in going for the goal himself) led to him trying to play in Berbatov etc. instead of shooting himself. I don't buy the "low self confidence" thing one bit. Rooney, if anything, is sure of himself. He will take chances, he just needs to get a couple of goals under his belt. In the meantime, I am glad Berbatov and Hernandez look prepared to bear some of his goal-scoring responsibilities.

A rather embarrassing mistake!

Today, I was reminded of a very basic step in programming. Always check-in your code! Well, to be fair to myself, I had to remove 1 file from the checked-in files before merging the transaction, since it was still being worked upon. But, I refreshed my view, and bam, it was overwritten, and it wasn't even checked in anymore!

So I had to write the whole function again. Thankfully, it was not very complicated, neither was it many lines of code so it wasn't a big deal. However, it could have caused a major problem had I been on a deadline and the file was vital. Moral of the story, if you need to unbranch something from your transaction for whatever reason, make sure your changes are backed up BEFORE you refresh the view!