And miles to go before I sleep …

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there’s some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I came across this beautiful poem the other day, and quite amazingly found it to be all-me. This is all I am about nowadays …

1.5 times loop

A:

StatusCode statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
while(statusCode != StatusCode.Complete)
{
Sleep(n);
statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
}

You would have come across this kind of code many times may be, when you need to check for status, wait if not completed, and poll again.  And you might have noticed the duplication of code, and would have modified it to:

B:

while (true)
{
statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
if (statusCode == StatusCode.Complete)
break;

Sleep(n);
}

in order to remove duplication. And it looks cool. But the thing I learned today from a guy-with-more-than-20-years-of-development-experience, is that we call this, B approach, a 1.5 times loop in structured programming terminology, and is a recommended way of avoiding code duplication.

So just in case you come across this, and wonder

We miss you !!!

I was looking for Nadeem Jaafri’s Men Tumhara Hun, Hamesha Sey, no not to dedicate it to anybody, but just to listen to it , I found a video on YouTube but that is mixed with all that indian stuff, and couldn’t find the original video. If you have it, see if you can share.

So I was looking for it, and on my way, I got to see some other oldies-goldies from 80s and 90s as well. For example it was Alamgir’s Men ne tumhari gaggar se, Gaggar ko chorro, Keh Dena Aankhon se, Dekha na tha and all those beautiful songs. Then it was Tumhara aur mera naam by Junaid,  Ajnabi Mujhe Tum Yaad Aate Ho by Aamir Saleem and No Love from Dr aur Billa. And I was thinking, why we don’t have anybody of that class today? If you look around you find many good young singers, but none of them belongs to the class. Why?

And its not just singers. We, me n MUF, were discussing about literature the other day, that we no more have Ahmed Nadeem Qasmis. We no longer have any likes of Faiz. We no longer have Mumtaz Muftis and Ibn-e-Inshas within us. We dont have any more Ahmed Farazs with us who can take the lead on poetry front. And there are no more Asghar Nadeem Saeeds and Amjad Islam Amjads and Anwar Maqsoods coming up to write among the best drama scripts in the world. Why is this so?

May be because the quality of humans has fallen, or lack of training, or lack of interest or lack of infrastructure, or whatever, but something is definitely wrong.

And this is an alarming situation. We are stagnant on our arts front. And nobody is bothered about it, which is even more alarming.

Well if we dont care about life of humans, who cares about the quality of it anyway …