I’ve been hacking ’round with HiSlain, and wrote a syntax highlighting plugin for it. Nothing fancy – just uses Pygments, but the process of modifying the plugin architecture to support this has been an awesome ride. I’ll probably open up a new GitHub project just for HiSlain Themes and Plugins.
And since I’ve to test out Syntax Highlighting,
print "I kinda like Python :)"
Small status update on my blogging platform‘s progress.
I’ve got the plugin infrastructure (mostly) in. Google Analytics Plugin and the RSS link plugin are working :)
Next Step is to make DISQUS a plugin too, and then I can start on porting themes!
I’m Jealous of Freya. I can’t really seem to figure out why.
Okay, I think I can. Guess it’s the anonymity. That she can write whatever se wants, without caring a damn.
I can’t. :(
Go, get jealous.
I promise her ‘the Treat of a Lifetime’. I cook up a reason realistic enough for her to buy it. I bribe off everyone else to make sure she is alone. And she is.
We walk along the sides of a typical city street. She is talking – she always is. When has she ever been quiet? Quiet is an adjective one doesn’t use with the noun ‘girl’. And she’s no ordinary girl. She is my girl. Atleast, I hope she will be. I hope to know in a few hours.
Pizza Hut is in sight. She expects me to take her there. But I don’t. I take her hand in mine and take a right turn, into a broken down building. She is surprised, but does not resist.
“Why hiding? Any of your relatives passing by?”
I like her talking style. I like her accent. Is there anything about her I don’t like?
“No, I am taking you to the treat”
A ‘wtf’ look consumed her face. She looks cuter than ever. When has she ever looked not-cute?
Before she could do or say anything, I reach for the remote in my pocket and activate the holodeck.
Within a second, we are at a beach. I can see a bunch of whales diving around at a short distance. Nobody was within eyesight. The sun was just about to set, and the waves reached just a few feet from our feet.
“Where the hell are we?” She is confused and anxious. But not afraid. When has she ever been afraid of anything? Afterall, I fell for her – she can not possibly be afraid of anything.
“This is Southern California, about 50,000 years before we were born”
“Riiiiight. Who are you, a Q? You can’t transport people back in time!”
“Ofcourse I’m not a Q, dumbo. I can’t transport people back in time. I just recreated the beach in that old building. We never left that old building – this is that old building”
Within a few sentences I explain to her how a holodeck can create any place we can imagine, and how I used it to make sure that the treat is, indeed, The Treat of a Lifetime.
She had a hard time believing it. With the gentle wind against her beautiful face blowing her hair up in a really, really cute way, even I have trouble believing that this was not a real beach.
We start walking. Nobody speaks. The only sounds are the waves crashing and the distant whales.
I can’t bear it anymore. I have to tell her, and now.
“Remember the first day we met? At the Milan Cultural Festival?”
“Sure I do! You were making a big fuss about not getting the top place in photography”
“Remember what you said that day?”
“Huh?”
“You said you would be the happiest person on earth if you found a mermaid who could gift you a gold fish”
“Huh? WTF are you memorizing these for?” Another slight arch of her forehead.
I try to keep myself composed. “Well, look there”
I point at the sea.
A mermaid crawls on to the sand. She has a bowl with a golden fish in it.
“OMG What the hell did you do that for?”
“I did it because I want you to be the happiest person in the world. Because I love you. I love you”
A tear rolls out of my eye. I had just said what I had been hoping to say since I first met her 3 years ago.
Things seem to happen in slow motion. The breeze made her hair look damn cute. The setting sun made her beautiful face seem like a spectacular miracle. These few moments, from the time I closed my mouth and she opened hers, seems like an eternity. An eternity I could live with.
A tear rolled out of her eye too. It sparkles like the diamond it was.
“All these years, I was waiting for you to say it first”
My heart skips a beat. She has said yes. She is my girl. Finally, someone who loves me as much as I love them!
Three hours later, the holodeck is powered down and she returns home.
I get beamed back to Voyager. Duty awaits.
It started when @msnarain pinged me one day and asked if I could help out with a small project involving twitter. I asked how small – and he described what would later on become http://novelrace.in. It ended up being pretty small – about 150 lines of code, excluding styles and stuff. Not bad, eh?
Oh, and if you have no idea what novelrace is – this post should clear things up. And yeah, I too tried participating (story 1, story 2, both written late at night), but I write crap :( Maybe some other time…
Update: According to this, the worth of 150 lines of Py code is ~4,000$! That much for a few days of coding? SERIOUSLY?
Should I tell her?
I shouldn’t.
I don’t even know her. She’s new in class. So am I. We’re all new in this class. We are first years, at the first day of college.
I don’t even know her name! And she obviously doesn’t know my name. We are, for all intents and purposes, complete strangers in the same class.
What if she takes it seriously? I’ll probably be branded the classholic flirt of the class, and never be taken seriously ever again. I’ll be banned, and I can’t even use a sock puppet!
But, she doesn’t look like the type who take it seriously. Now, that girl over there? The type to take things seriously. I’d probably get a sternly worded letter from her dad if I so much looked at her. And a few broken bones if I tried talking. Meh.
But her. She doesn’t look anything like that at all. I could see her laughing with her nascent friends. Over some piece of silly joke probably. Or maybe a comment about some guy. Who knows! Just one of the things girls normally just laugh about and then say ‘what? nothing’ when you ask them about it later. There’s probably a term for that. ‘Sweet nothings?’ I don’t know. Ask a girl.
Maybe I should just go and tell her. It’s no big deal. It’s not like nobody ever does stuff like this. Yeah, it’ll be the first time for me, but heck! Everyone has a first time! I’ll probably get used to it.
Okay, I’ll just walk up to her, say “Hi”, and then say it. No big deal. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Big deal!
I walked up to the gang of giggles. “Hey!”. I got an enthusiastic, sweet sounding “Hey!” back.
Wow, awesome voice! Now, not to lose composure. Just say it already goddarn it!
“Pretty dress you’ve got!”
“Awww cute! Thank you!”
Wow, that ‘omg squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’ voice again. Seriously? It’s almost like speaking to a grown up kid! But I’ve got to say it!
“Just the dress”
(And thus began the most vile, spineless, soulless part of his life. And NO, you do not want to know how it ended)
(All parts of this story are complete, utter, crappy attempts at fiction, ofcoruse!)
He was coding.
He was on a bus, and coding. He had bought himself a cute little black Netbook just so he could open up Vim on a bus and code Python. He is a geek. A young, 18 year old typical geek. As typical as your usual geek.
The bus was quite empty. It was late at night, this was proably the last bus for the day, and except the Driver & Conductor, there were probably 4 people on the bus. Including our geek.
That was until she got in.
She was younger than him. And pretty. Not pretty as in a ‘OMG Dude that chick is HAWT!’ pretty, but pretty as in ‘Wow, isn’t she darn beautiful?’ pretty. She looked out of place in that shabby bus, alone at the late hour. Like someone had embedded a beautiful snippet of Python inside a messy tangle of Java written by an ex-VB developer who learnt programming in Turbo C.
He saw her. “Nice hair”, he thought. And went back to coding.
Five silent minutes went past.
“Wow, what a Vim user! In the wild!”
He was startled. He was ‘in the zone’, and when you’re the zone, everything outside your screen is just a blur. The blur slowly started sharpening itself.
He turned back. It was her.
“Huh?”
“Your editor? It’s Vim”
“Huh huh?”
“So you’re not a real programmer. Real programmers use emacs“
“Eh?”
“And real programmers don’t use Python either. We code in C“
“Erm, wha? Huh?”
“Yes, C. And Emacs. Vim is for Wimps. You would probably run windows on that thing if you could’ve. You are a total waste of space”
“What the?”
She timed it to perfection. The bus stopped. She got down, blew him a kiss, and went on her merry way.
“Damn! She’s a programmer, a girl, my age, who does emacs vs vim, AND I DIDN’T GET HER NUMBER!”
(Partially inspired by this. It first went off into a wild arc involving a Ruby script written to generate Python code cough, but then I decided against including that)
(And yes, obviously, comments welcome. #novelrace helped me get off my ass and start writing, so I’ll be producing crap for some time now. But still, call crap crap :) )
Seirously.
My shirts went from L to M
My pants went from 40 to 34
I’m awesome :)