Confessions of a Wannabe Entrepreneur

Which state of mind?

2011-10-23T20:25:00.001+05:30

The one big difference I find in myself in the last couple of years is that I take the random normal conversations with some of my friends with a pinch of salt. Does that mean that now finally I have a thought process and mind of my own? Or does that mean I am uncomfortable with some of the points that I hear and thus tend to ignore them? What is my state of mind?

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Unsubscribe

2011-10-08T03:46:00.001+05:30

I don't remember how I ended up registering on the wayn.com website. But lately, as I have been on a drive to reduce email overload, I have been unsubscribing from various mailing lists and wayn.com is one among many. But it stands out.

No matter how many times I unsubscribe from their list, I still keep receiving the emails. Funny thing I noticed the last couple of times is whenever I try to unsubscribe, I notice that I am already unsubscribed in their settings. Yet I keep receiving emails from them. Perhaps its a bug. Or perhaps its plain simple desperation.

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Losing touch

2011-10-03T01:13:00.001+05:30

For the past couple of weeks, I have been writing a lot of SQL queries as we do a major data update of the db. The update has been fairly painful, requiring a couple of days of manual mapping of old and new data. But what I realized over the last couple of weeks is that I have forgotten SQL and badly.

Before I dove into the world of startups, I worked at Tesco HSC and I spent a lot of time over there writing SQL queries. Over the years I had become pretty good at it and had learnt some neat tricks such as using a pivot function. The reports I had developed required some complex data processing which meant a lot of temporary tables and a lot of complex sql queries, all while maintaining acceptable execution time.

But three years later, I seem to have forgotten SQL. I feel my current proficiency in SQL has gone down from intermediate to beginner. But then I think that three years ago, I sucked at CSS and Javascript. I have been spending more time on front end stuff over the last year than back end. Also, I guess the back end stuff that I have had to touch has been fairly simple. So I guess it's OK.

But it certainly isn't nice to feel that you are losing touch! :(

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The importance of a good UI

2011-08-19T03:46:00.001+05:30

The most popular job board for startups nowadays seems to be the one by hasgeek. There have been other startup job boards around for a while, but the hasgeek job-board seems to have positioned itself as the defacto job board for startups. In fact, I have seen job posts by companies like Akamai, which is a testament to the popularity.

What were the reasons that in a short span of time it has become the leading job board for startups and geeks? One is of course, it is FREE. This is in contrast to pluggd.in job board which charges you $10 for 30 days. But I have a feeling that the stickiness factor of the hasgeek job board is its UI. Displaying job posts as sticky post-its is something which leaves an impression on the mind of any visitor.

The underlying features are nothing different. The fields are pretty standard and the data you enter at jobs.hasgeek.in is what you would enter at any other job board. Perhaps the ability to tweet the job and spread the word is critical as well, but my hunch is that the decisive factor is the UI.

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Patience - A key weapon when busting bugs in someone else's code

2011-07-27T23:39:00.001+05:30

At some point of time in your career as a software engineer/programmer/developer, you would have come across a situation where you were required to fix bugs or add a feature to an existing code base. Over the past few of months, I have been regularly in such situations as I help develop the newer and slick version of babajob.

A thing which I have noticed over the past few months is my general frustration at how things were implemented previously by different people at different points of time. The real frustration happens when I have to try and resolve bugs which occur because of trying to integrate certain portions of the old pieces with the new one. For this I have to understand -

What feature was the previous developer trying to implement?
How was he/she trying to implement it?

If you are able to figure out the second question, figuring out the first one becomes easier as well. But trying to understand how the features were implemented has been a frustrating experience. And once I did understand how it was implemented, it lead to more frustration because I have never come across such implementations before and I always wondered why couldn't this be simply done the way most ASP.NET developers would do it? After all, what is the point of using ASP.NET if your new/edit forms are in .htm pages with javascript which is not jquery or even the retired Microsoft Ajax library. And worst of all, the javascript is not there for ajax calls, but to actually submit the form to a different aspx page!

Of course, over the course of time I have come to realize that the intention in many cases was merely to avoid duplication of code between the web and mobile interfaces. But this could have been achieved in a better manner, a direction in which we are headed slowly but surely.

Coming back to the title of the post, it is very easy to get frustrated by what you perceive as short-comings in the previous implementation. But getting frustrated is unproductive. It makes you lose your focus and concentration from finishing the task at hand and instead shifts your focus to the deficiencies of the previous implementation. As a result, you end up spending more time debugging because you have lost the focus and are unable to spot bugs which you would have had if you were in a calm and focused state of mind.

The best thing in such cases is to just get up and take a 2 min break, drink a glass of water, take a deep breath and try and bring your focus back to what you wanted to achieve. Be patient and don't get flustered easily.

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Thoughts on the Digital Divide

2011-05-15T04:07:00.001+05:30

Last week, I was at a job fair organized by a Micro Finance Institution (MFI) and the target audience were the customers of the particular MFI. Most of them were people from the lower middle class. People vying for the blue collared jobs such as typists, office assistants, drivers, maids, receptionists etc.
It is a humbling experience to meet these people and listen to their aspirations and problems.

I talked to quite a few of them. However, there was one lady whose story intrigued me the most. She must've been aged around 50 and used to work in a factory where she put windings on transformers. She was now looking for any job. Did the factory shut down? Why was she looking for a job that paid her less than the one which she had? Turns out she quit the factory job so that she could withdraw all her provident fund savings to pay a loan which she had taken for her daughter's marriage. No this is not a tragic story from a 70's bollywood movie. By paying up the loan upfront she saved on the interest which would have accrued. Or so she said.

She spoke English very fluently and could speak three other languages and was on the lookout for any decent job. I explained to her how babajob could make her life easier by showing various available jobs in one place so that she could pick and choose the ones she liked and then go ahead. Searching becomes hassle free to quite an extent. Though she did not know how to use the internet or a PC, she understood the benefit and said she would ask her daughter to search for a suitable job.

I think to bridge the digital divide, it is essential to market technology as something which makes life easier and hassle free for the masses. The masses don't care about the internet. They want better jobs. Farmers want better forecast and information. If the internet is seen as something which addresses the day to day problems of these people, then you wouldn't have to ask them to learn how to use the internet. They would learn that themselves!

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Pamphlets/Flyers

2011-05-15T03:40:00.001+05:30

When was the last time that you went to any exhibition and remembered an exhibitor for the pamphlets/brochures they were distributing? Chances are very rare. What you might remember is what they demonstrated to you and the impact that demo had on you.

If that is the case, then should you focus your energy and resources on secondary materials such as pamphlets? Absolutely, because your customers and users expect your pamphlets or other printed marketing material to be of a certain standard. The better your flyer/pamphlet, the longer is the time before it ends up in the dust-bin. In case you didn't realize, all pamphlets/flyers end up in the waste some time or the other. It might be immediately after handing out or might be months later when the customer is moving to a new place and needs to get rid of the useless stuff.

Remember next time you are putting up a stall at a fair - pamphlets are secondary marketing materials and you are not at the fair to distribute pamphlets. You are there to make an impact on the minds of people whose pain points you are trying solve.

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Laziness leads to Innovation

2011-05-15T03:29:00.001+05:30

So many times in the past year, I would return home to find that someone else has parked his/her bike/scooty in the spot where I usually park. Those who have faced this would know just how irritating it is. But a few weeks back, things changed.

Troubled by the chaos and bashing that ensued every morning, when people staying in the apartment complex left for their offices, the new security guard divided the whole parking area into parking spots. The parking space is now managed very efficiently and there is no confusion. It has been designed by the security guard so brilliantly that there is no way a vehicle gets stuck (at least I haven't found any design flaw till now). So now he does not need to be woken up in the morning to pus some bike out of the way.

I was amazed by the design of the parking space. But I was astonished that a security guard who has basic education designed the parking space so efficiently. I know some of my batchmates from engineering would not get it right.

The only motivation for doing this was the guard did not want to be disturbed early in the morning while he was sleeping. Did laziness lead to innovation in this case?

What do you think?

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Marking Facebook Posts as Spam - Messaging Challenge

2011-05-05T00:58:00.001+05:30

Every now and then, there will be a moron amongst your friends who will click on a link which will lead to spam posts on your wall. The latest one doing the rounds is that of a video of Osama Bin Laden being shot.

3 such posts on my wall and I was fed up. I clicked to remove the post. One of the options that came up was Mark as Spam. The question then was - Will marking this post as spam result in all posts from that friend as spam? Or, will it result in no more Osama videos posts? Does marking my friends post as spam result in some adverse effect on friends' facebook profile?

Is the messaging clear, or did anybody else have these doubts in a similar situation?

PS:I totally forgive the news channels for the Osama - Obama typo. I made the same mistake in the second para. Luckily I spotted it before it was published.

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Trying to deceive or just an honest mistake?

2011-04-01T17:56:00.001+05:30

That is the question which I am asking and I need your opinion.

Like buttons are now ubiquitous. You see them everywhere on the web. One place where they are prominent and where I actually click on them are news websites. There are so many articles, opinon columns etc. that without a recommendation system, catching up on news seems to be an overload to the brain. Like buttons help me recommend articles which I like so that my friends may read the same. They also help me discover articles which my friends liked. So alongwith my twitter feed, which serves as the primary recommendation filter, the facebook likes provide a good way for me to discover content.

The standard practice that most international news-sites and blogs have, is to associate a Like button with a specific article or a post. You will notice this pattern in sites like techcrunch and new york times . So when I 'Like' a post on techcrunch by Vivek Wadhwa, this recommendation shows up on my friends' news feed and points to the particular article.

Now, today I read this article about Shahid Afridi asking, "Why do we hate India?". I thought it was a good piece of news so I 'Liked' the article. Or at least that is what I thought I was doing. A few hours later when I logged into facebook again my 'news feed' had quite a few posts from Zeecric.com But why was this showing on my 'news feed'? I never 'liked' Zeecric.com. All I did was 'Like' a particular article on Zeecric.com. But wait a second. That is what I thought I had done, when I clicked on the Like button for the particular article. In reality, the 'Like' button I clicked was for the facebook page of Zeecric.com. So while I thought I was 'Liking' a particular article, I was actually deceived into 'liking' (rather subscribing to posts) from Zeecric.com

So I felt cheated and angry. But the big question now is, was this deception intentional or an honest mistake? And while the number of likes of the facebook page may increase and give impression of growing popularity, if more and more users had the same experience as me, isn't it actually a sign of the brand losing its credibility? What are your thoughts? Have you noticed this in other websites? Is this an India only phenomena?

PS: I noticed that Snapdeal also has a single like button for all its deals and I DO NOT think that is an honest mistake. Its deceiving the user and then spamming the facebook feeds.

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Yahoo Mail Narrow Search–Awesome

2011-03-23T00:30:00.002+05:30

Over the last 3 years, my gmail address has become my primary email address. I hardly log into my yahoo mail address anymore, maybe once a month. My Yahoo address used to be my primary email address. So why did I stop using Yahoo mail. Well essentially because of two reasons.
1) Search - The search feature of Yahoo sucked. I found it difficult to locate mails which I knew were there in my Yahoo inbox. I found gmail search easy and effective.And slowly I stopped giving people my Yahoo address. I stopped checking my Yahoo mail.
2) Spam - Perhaps the spam filter of gmail is more effective. Or perhaps Yahoo being the number 1 site a few years ago attracted more spammers. I don't know but my Yahoo mail always had more spam than meaningful email.
However, today I had to log into Yahoo mail to find and sort some important mails which I do receive on my Yahoo address. I don't know why but I just tried the search term that I would have tried in my gmail (from:emailaddress) and voila.. it worked. Perhaps this feature has been there for long and I did not know. But this really made my life easier. And now comes the best part.
On the right hand side, a small search options pane opened up giving me very useful options to narrow down my search to the relevant mails. Check out the screen shot below(click on image to view in full size):

These options were super useful. I specially liked the attachment type option as I was looking for a pdf and I knew it was sent sometime in 2009.
All may not be well at Yahoo but this feature sure rocks! Yahoo might just have regained a bit of its lost mojo.

Staying in the Zone (The Social Network vs Inception)

2011-01-05T05:22:00.001+05:30

One of the best things that I liked in the movie "The Social Network" was the concept of "wired in". In November, I was looking back at the effort of the last few months and was wondering where did I go wrong. I thought it took me way too much time to come up with a stable release of CAT-Ninja. Why did it take me so much time and what could I do to improve?

One of the many things I came across was people talking about getting in the zone, or what was depicted as "wired in" in the movie. This struck a chord with me. I was never in any zone, rather I was always on the HIghway to the Danger Zone.Things that could go wrong, went wrong. Things that couldn't go wrong, also went wrong. Being a one man army (definitely not like this one man army :P) I was unable to manage tasks properly and was most of the time firefighting. Also, what Raghu of Recruiterbox calls the challenge of context switching, is magnified when you are working alone. Its very difficult to sit and code right after your vendor informs you that they will be missing yet another deadline.

So I decided that I shall plan my tasks keeping in mind that most coding work shall be done in time-slots with absolutely no disturbance. That I shall try and get in the zone or be wired in. So with the New Year, I decided to start that practise and started work on a mini project which I have to finish by Jan end. I am also using this mini-project as an opportunity to switch from webforms to mvc, so when I started coding and learning mvc on the night of 2 Jan, I was amazed that I had spent the whole night learning, reading and trying stuff. The same continued on the night of Jan 3. I wasn't going to Jaaga as I was pretty sure I was heading into the zone and that too pretty soon, I would be cranking code out like anything. My new Dell and the switch to Windows 7 from Vista also added to the pleasure of coding.

However, as I was deep into thinking about TDD and mocking frameworks, something happened. Inception. From within that peace and quiet at 2 am in the night, when I was thinking about TDD, came an idea into my head. A brainwave! A Eureka moment. Suddenly it was very obvious as to why the current product did not gain traction and what could be the possible pivots in the coming months. Excited I tried getting back to work, but was unable to code. The incepion had happened and I was way out of any zone. All I could think was the new approach.

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Awesome Response to the post "Keeping Track of the Roads"

2010-12-28T02:26:00.001+05:30

A few weeks back, I had blogged about "Keeping Track of the Roads". I shared the link to the blog post in HackerStreet ( a clone of HackerNews, but focused on India). One of the users has shared his experience about the RTI process in the responses and it is an awesome read. Do check it out and join the discussion.

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Keeping track of the Roads

2010-11-30T12:27:00.001+05:30

The state of Bangalore’s roads has become pathetic. At least the roads on which I drive frequently. Old Airport Road has been dug every now and then which makes it difficult to ascertain whether the pot hole you encountered was caused by the digging or by the degradation of the road. The stretch from Garuda Mall to Hosmat Hospital had such deep potholes that when I accidently drove over one, the impact was so strong that the attachment holding the headlight broke on the left side. The potholes were filled recently.

But it begs the question why did we have potholes in the first place? When were the roads last rebuilt? If my memory does not fail me, it was probably around a year and a half ago, somewhere between January and May 2009 (though I cannot be cent percent sure). The roads were built by the present state government, which came to power in May 2008 and it was done during late winter/spring well in advance of the monsoons, so my timing cannot be off by much (If you thought the monsoons only affected when the rice paddies are sown, well there you go.)

Is that the life of our roads? I searched on Google and after trying a few different keywords came across this site, where somebody has answered a similar question. So an asphalt road’s life may vary from 10-20 years depending on various factors. That is a far cry from a road life of 2 years over here. In fact, I am not even sure if all the roads in Bangalore have the same life.

One of the public figures that I follow on twitter, tweeted a few months back that he/she had spoken to someone who was into construction of roads. The roads they had developed in Orissa would last longer than the roads they had developed in Maharashtra even thought the Tender amount was the same. This was because in Maharashtra to win the contract they had to bribe, so accordingly the contractor used less quality materials for development of roads in Maharashtra, so that his business remains viable. ( I would link to the specific tweet if I could find it)

It is hard to believe that such cases do not happen throughout the country. Read this article in the Forbes for instance. Even if corruption cases are uncovered, they are silently shut down due to political pressure.

Is there anyway we can fight this? An idea occurred to me when I read this and this tweet by Indus Khaitan. Why not build an app which tracks all the data related to building of roads which is integrated with google maps and location enabled? Lets again take the case of the stretch of road from Garuda Mall to Hosmat Hospital and also assume that our app (lets call it betterroads) is available. I access the app from my smartphone which is GPS enabled.

It automatically maps my current location to the road and pops up a map with information about the road such as when was it last built/relaid, the expected life, cost of building the road, contractor who built etc. All this info can be available with the app through RTI. Now since I encountered a pot-hole, I can report a pothole and also rate the road. I can also take a pic of the pothole and upload it on the app. So can anybody else. Now since the road is in a bad shape in 2010 whereas its expected life was till 2014, the following steps could be taken :

1) The road is relaid.

2) It is determined whether any digging etc from other government departments reduced the life of the road.

3) If not, the contractor is blacklisted from participating in any future government contracts.

Imagine if such a thing were possible for each and every road in this country. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Not only would one be able to report bad roads, but be able to pin point possible instances of corruption.

So why not build such an app? What are the challenges? Well I think an app to report potholes is pretty much possible because that is essentially a mashup of Google maps with Crowdsourced data, even though this shall have challenges such as ensuring the data remians relevant and provides true picture. No point in having a road reported a bad when it has been repaired recently.

The bigger challenge comes when you want to have the data about road construction from the government through RTI. Getting and organizing this data in the current scenario is a gargantuan task in itself and probably needs an NGO to focus on this. All the roads on Google maps will have to be marked according to the way contracts are awarded for road construction. i.e in the db of the app, the stretch of Old Airport Road from Diamond District to Pizza Hut Signal could be one row (road id : 1) in the db whereas from Pizza Hut to Marthahalli would be a different row(road id: 2), even though the whole thing is Old Airport Road. This could be because contracts for repair of the first stretch could be given out at a different time and to a different contractor and if we are capturing this information then we have mark roads accordingly.

Also, ensuring that data is provided by the government, in the format that is required, consistently is going to be a challenge. I am not even sure what and how does the government track. The essential thing to ease the whole thing would be digitization of government records and provide the data to NGO’s and researchers through an RTI api. Even after the data is available, there are going to be many issues such as agreeing to a road life at given cost, ensuring government agencies act etc. All this just reinforces the adage that “Technology is just an enabler” and the app in itself is not going to solve problems overnight.

Then what is the point of discussing all this? Well for starters this can be tried at a small scale, say only Bangalore. That would be the MVP for this idea. No need to wait for government to digitize its records. File RTI’s and manually get the data for Bangalore or a smaller part of Bangalore and develop the app. See if people use it. After all, as someone once told me, when Naukri.com started, they were manually entering jobs into their website.

Perhaps a few techies along with an NGO such as Janagraha could take a shot at it. What do you think? Worth a try?

Do you really need a Web Designer?

2010-11-26T20:48:00.001+05:30

This is a question that has been asked and discussed time and again. While it is awesome if you have a kick ass designer in your team, what does one do when no one in the startup team is has good design skills. I mean no one in the team can start from scratch and design a decent looking UI. What does one do then?

The first thought that occurs is to outsource your design work. Seems like a good idea. But if the startup is bootstrapped and has not yet found a proven revenue model ( or in other words you have zero revenues) is it a good idea to spend on the design of the website? In India, good designers charge as much as their western counterparts and if someone is not charging enough and promising you awesome designs, he/she is probably giving false promises (at least that has been my experience). If outsourcing to a web designer is within your budget, then, by all means, hire a good designer. But what if the cash situation is a bit tight?

Learn to do stuff on your own? Well if you can then nothing like it. But if you do not have the bandwidth to learn, I would suggest learn just enough to modify somebody else's work. There are tonnes of awesome freely available CSS templates available on the web. Just pick the one which you feel shall suit your needs and learn to modify it according to your needs. It looks decent enough for you to focus on validating your idea. And when your app is growing and you feel a change is needed, hire a kick ass web designer to revamp your app. At this point of time, you shall have much more clarity about what you want from the designer. I recommend this approach to everyone.

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Insights

2010-11-12T00:57:00.001+05:30

"Why do people watch Big Boss? Completely fail to understand" This was a tweet on my timeline.

What interested me in this tweet was the second part. Completely fail to understand. So do I. I have never watched Big Boss and I have no clue why people would like to watch it.

But this only means that I do not have insights which the producers of Big Boss have. The question then is, what are the insights that I have which other people don't have? What are the things that I am sure people would do, but others fail to understand why? And why/ how/since when do I have such insights? What is the basis for such an insight/gut feel?

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Perception vs. Reality - Some interesting thoughts

2010-10-19T22:16:00.001+05:30

One of the great lessons of starting up has been the realization of the difference between perception and reality. What do I mean by that? Lets say you hit upon an idea which you think has huge potential. You talk to a few friends and they seem to agree. You get down to work, talk to probable future customers, research the market and your hypothesis seems to be validated. You seem to be solving a major pain point for customers. You form a team and start work on the product. As you are nearing the release of your first version, a big company also releases a very similar service, and most of it is for FREE. End of the road for your startup? How does one react to such a situation? Does the motivation level remain the same?

The above is just an example and if you are starting up, you may come across many similar situations in your journey. It could be something as huge as the example above or something as small as a friend promising to help you out with certain things and then getting caught up with some other important priorities. Whether the startup is going to succeed or fail is just a perception. Take the example above. Its not that the big company was waiting for the release of your first version to near, for it to launch its service. No. It probably started work on developing that service before you did. If , a couple of months ago, you had known that the big company was planning to come up with a service like that, you would probably not have worked your ass off to develop your product.

But you did work your ass off and developed that product, because you thought there was potential. Now, that's interesting, isn't it? A couple of months ago, if you had that bit of information about the big company's plans, the potential did not seem that huge, coz "anyway, they are already doing it." But without that bit of information, the potential seems huge or "nobody has solved this yet, we are going to be rich having solved this." But did the potential of the idea, really change? Before that bit of information, there were say a a supposed 100,000 people who were looking for a service like yours. That number does not change even if you have the information about the big company planning to release their service. The potential of the idea has not changed. What has changed is your perception about the potential, because of the piece of information you were supplied.

Thus the more information/data you have, the closer is your perception to the reality. This applies everywhere. People are afraid of cancer and not common cold. Why? If I were to tell you that your cancer can be cured by eating a new magic pill, will you be as bothered.

The reason I write this is to remind myself of this realization. That change in one's perception doesn't necessarily change the reality.

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Moving towards an Instant World

2010-09-20T19:33:00.001+05:30

I love Google Instant Search. It is fast and it has changed the way I search. I expect the search behavior of other users may be changing as well. A question that comes to mind is how is your website affected if it does not feature in the top results. I think users are more likely to change the search query rather than navigate to the next page, when using instant search.

But apart from web search, Instant is going to change the way applications are developed. The first one which came to my mind is helpdesk software. Imagine a call center operator having access to instant results. He/She can keep talking and search for a resolution to your problem in their knowledge base. Instant results means less chances of putting you on hold. Faster search results could mean lesser Minutes per Incident. Just as my web search behavior has changed, call center operators will change current ways to better handle calls and provide more resolutions. A direct benefit to the customer is in cases where talking to an operator is charged, such as when you now call Airtel helpline and talk to a human being, you are charged. If the operator takes less time answering your call, you save money.

I think this is a good idea which will make its way into the market sooner or later. A good idea for a startup? I am not so sure. After all, how much time would it take for current helpdesk companies to bring this feature into their products?

What do you think?

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Freaky Facebook

2010-05-13T08:11:00.001+05:30

I was absolutely freaked and startled moments ago. I was watching this pic by Bill Gates on twitpic. When suddenly I noticed a facebook badge for the fan page of KissMetrics on the page. See the screenshot below.

It suddenly struck me that I follow KissMetrics CEO Hiten Shah on twitter. Not on facebook, on twitter. Yet there it was, the facebook recommendation that I Like KissMetrics. How did facebook know what my twitter account is? How did it know that I follow Hiten? Why did I get the recommendation to follow KissMetrics and not anything else? Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I know information on twitter is visible to all. But this level of association freaked me out and left me with the above unanswered questions? Have you noticed anything similar?

I answered a question on Aardvark

2010-05-08T05:50:00.001+05:30

Aardvark is a great service and the company was recently acquired by Google. Basically, it is an ask and answer service but a very effective one indeed. Sometimes I just try and answer random questions and today I answered one about Currencies.

(From Maurice S./21/M/Beirut,Lebanon -- about 3 hours ago)
*currency*
I do not understand this business concept:
The flow of goods and services between countries generates a supply of the importer's currency and a demand of the exporter's currency? I do not understand the supply/demand part??

My answer:

me: I am not a business or economics student but let me just try and explain what I understood. Suppose your currency is gold and my currency silver. You are selling some carpets. So you are the exporter. I want those carpets so I am the importer. To pay you, i need Gold which is your currency. Silver is not good for you. So I will go to a third person who exchanges gold for silver. I ask this third person for gold, If there are other people wanting ur carpets, they will also ask for gold, thus increasing the demand for gold. At the same time, I am giving silver in exchange for this gold, so the supply of silver increases. You can now apply this analogy to countries and currencies. Hope that was helpful

You can see the thread here .

Was my reasoning correct?

How secure is Facebook extension for Chrome?

2010-05-08T02:42:00.001+05:30

I recently installed the facebook extension for Google Chrome. But how secure is it? Look at the 2 screenshots below.

Screenshot with the extension

Screenshot after uninstalling the extension

When the extension was installed, my facebook home page was appearing in place of the Techcrunch on facebook badge. What if this happened on a public computer, say at an internet cafe?

Needless to say, I uninstalled the extension immediately. And to end, I wanted to share an article I read sometime this past week but I can’t find it right now. It came down heavily on Chrome for still having some basic loopholes, which other browsers learned long back. Kinda like you put some laws in place after the Great Depression of 1930 to prevent a recession in the future. But some smart people repealed the law (or gave exceptions to some firms) and voila – we have the recession of 2008! Lessons learned in the past have to be applied.

Availability and Capacity Management

2010-05-06T02:36:00.001+05:30

For people familiar with ITIL, the above two words should not be alien. I was introduced to ITIL in 2006 as ITIL implementation was sort of my primary job for the first 1.5 years of my professional life. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices that organizations should implement for IT Services Management. However, when I was attending a three day workshop on ITIL v3, I realized the basic principles of ITIL can be applied to manage anything and not just IT Services.

Two of the processes are Availability management and Capacity Management.What do they mean? Suppose you have been made in-charge of water supply at a 3 day NCC camp for 450 cadets. The first question is how much water are you going to need per day. Lets say you need 1500 liters of water per day. Fine. But you need to store this water. You have been provided with 2 storage tanks of 500 liters. This is your capacity, ie 1000 liters. But you notice that your capacity is less than the daily requirement. What should you do about it? You ask for another tank, but your commanding officer informs you that a pump powered by a genset will fill the tanks when the need arises. So even though you do not have full capacity to serve the daily need, you can still ensure availability thanks to the genset powered pump. Of course, you will have to ensure that the diesel for the genset is available when required. By finely balancing the capacity and availability, you are able to meet the demand and a lot of satisfied cadets. Also notice that having the tanks (capacity) does not ensure availability.

This is a very simple scenario, but something which we find almost everywhere. Do your servers have the capacity to process 100,000 simultaneous requests? Do you have sufficient developers to finish a particular project in 2 months time (Capacity)? Are all the developers available during this time? I heard a couple of them are going on a trip to Ladakh (unavailable). You get the basic idea, right!

Anil Enthu Kumar and I made an interesting observation a few weeks back. There is tea shop near his house which we frequent. Opposite to this tea shop is another tea shop, which pretty much provides the same services. However, the tea shop which we visit is more crowded and has more customers. Always! Lets call this the Tea Shop A and the one opposite, the less popular one as Tea shop B. Both of us asked the same question, Why did we go to this particular tea shop A when we could have easily gone to the other one? The answer to that was, one amongst our group of friends had visited the Tea Shop A and the next time he went with the others, he chose that particular tea shop. So the others started going to the same tea shop. We never considered going to tea shop B. Why? Because Tea Shop A was available whenever we went. Tea shop B wasn’t always open, something which I noticed in the past few weeks. Availability giving the competitive edge to a tea shop, ensuring more customers!

Why the sudden post on availability and capacity management? Well I was trying to book a domain for the new project I am working on, but the site of ZNET India gave an error. It wasn’t available when I wanted it to be. While I am not going to any of their competitors (just yet), the fact is simple things like availability are such a critical part of the customer experience. Look at flipkart. It is one of the hottest startups in India today, and how did they reach here – by simply focusing on ensuring good service availability to their customers.

To end this random post, I think about the pressing problems we face – depleting water table, clean energy etc. Can we ensure availability of water? What happens if there is drought for two consecutive years and the monsoon fails as well? Do we have capacity to sustain the water needs of the ever growing populace? Can simple principles from capacity and availability management be applied to solve such problems? What do you think?

Breadcrumbs – Who needs them anymore?

2010-05-03T22:43:00.001+05:30

When I started learning Web Development, breadcrumbs was the way one thought about navigation on a website. For the uninitiated, breadcrumbs are highlighted in the screenshot below.

However, none of the top websites that I visit everyday have breadcrumbs. Take a look at the screen clippings below.

Breadcrumbs, I read, provided easy navigation for users and should be implemented in a website. I tried to implement it in one of the projects for my previous company. I tried to implement it for CAT-NINJA. For implementing breadcrumbs in ASP.NET, you define the navigational structure of your site in Sitemap.xml file and the SiteMapPath control automatically creates the breadcrumb structure for you. The problem was defining the navigational structure. After putting a fair amount of time defining the navigational structure of the web site, we found it very difficult to accommodate changes to the structure. More often than not a page would come up where the navigation on the website would not match the way we put it in the Sitemap xml. At the end of the day, this left users with an inconsistent experience.

I am not sure how helpful breadcrumbs are for site navigation. Looking at some of the sites above I dont think I am going to worry about them anymore. It may be helpful only in some particular cases like the help section of your website or in cases where you are showing some sort of documentation. See the screen clippings below :

Breadcrumbs in Google Help(above). A breadcrumbs like navigation at msdn(below).

How has your experience been implementing breadcrumbs on your website? Is it useful?

My picture on the lpad site

2010-05-01T02:28:00.001+05:30

Lpad is a launchpad for startups in Chandigarh area.

I just saw a snap , which was taken at the Morpheus open House at Java City in Bangalore on Feb 28 (I think) where me and Shashank are chatting with Abheek of RobotsAlive, on the site of Lpad.

The screenshot is below.

Remembering the rains!

2010-05-01T00:45:00.001+05:30

Rains are amazing. They bring respite from the summer heat. The smell of rainwater falling on burning earth is something else. If its a thunderstorm, I sit and count the seconds between a lighting flash and the sound of thunder, thus determining how far the lightning strike was(its something I picked from a Walt Disney Movie – In Search of the Castaways, anyone seen it?) Sometimes there is a power cut and you are left with nothing to do but listen to splashing drops of rain and the thunder of the lightning. Its a raw form of communication with Mother Nature - where for a brief moment you forget about the post you just liked on facebook, the tea you put on the kettle, the cell-phone you cant find in the darkness – its just you marveling at the lightning across the sky. You feel you rediscovered a part of yourself – something ancient, something raw – even though moments later the feelings gone.

Rains also bring memories of places, of people, of times gone by. Deepanjan Dey has written what I consider a masterpiece titled “Random Rainy Days”. It expresses what many of us feel on Random Rainy Days.

Today was one such Random Rainy Day! After dinner I felt like having a chilled coke so I walked to the nearby store. There was a slight drizzle but the normally crowded street was empty. Deja Vu! I was reminded of the rainy days of Manipal.

It used to rain non stop – remember! Sometimes I would decide to go to Timmy’s for a Keshto and a chai (no not a sutta – i do not smoke). It was difficult to find people who would accompany me in the rains and thus sometimes I went alone. Of course, on the way people would hand over 10 bucks to me to get some sutta. Sometimes they would also hand over an umbrella, not because they cared that much that I would get drenched, but because it was one of those rare moments when they had somebody’s umbrella with them. Whose? Who cares – just get the ciggs will ya?

I would climb the short wall behind 9th block and jump to the other side, carefully making my way to Timmy’s, on the lookout for snakes who perhaps might decide it was lovely weather for an afternoon crawl! Ever since I saw a cobra crawling on the road next to Timmy’s, I was fairly certain I was going to die bitten by a cobra which was hiding below the bench inside Timmy’s shack. Whenever I entered Timmy’s shack, I tried to see whether there were any snakes around. But it was pitch dark and I reconciled myself by thinking that any snakes in the shack would have crawled away the moment Timmy anna would appear from behind the shack shouting “Kaun hai?”. You cannot imagine how terrified I am of snakes! Yet I used to go to Timmy’s every day, overcoming my fears to savor half fries, keshtos, chai and the sight of the valley. That sight was something else when it rained.

Sometimes I would start playing songs like “Raindrops keep falling on my head..” on my comp and others would join in for some good music and good bakar.

During the rains, you also got to better know random people studying with you. Waiting for the rains to get over, you would start reading the notices on the notice boards, even though you had read all of them a couple of hours ago on the way back from lunch. You would find a notice about the fine you had to pay for some random thing or the available rooms in 10th block for your batch and then you would start cursing the college authorities with some random dude you hardly spoke to. Of course, some years later that random dude became a very good friend as both of you were placed in the same company.

I saw this video on facebook today in Mayur Kislaya’s news feed. Its a recent one of the rains in Manipal. Then I went out and was reminded of Manipal and all of you as I soaked some of the drizzle.

Remembering all the MITians and Manipal on this random rainy day! We Rock!

An example of Bad Design

2010-04-24T15:47:00.001+05:30

Looking at the screenshot below, you will be wondering why is this post titled “An example of Bad Design”. After all the design looks fine and elegant.

A wise man once said, “looks can be deceiving” and rightly so in this particular case. While the visual design of this page from the site gojiyo.com seems nice, it is the interaction design which fails. You are asked to choose you username, fill your email address and select a password, which you do. But post that you are asked to install the unity3D plugin and are given a button to download the plugin. Clicking on the button takes you away from this page and into a unity page where you can download the plugin. But what happened to the sign up process. Was that completed? NO!

If you are engaging the user in a flow, you should ensure that the flow is completed. What if I start downloading the plugin and then completely forget about why I was downloading it. It is, after all, an era of short attention spans. In this case the download link should have opened in a new window or perhaps better still it should have appeared after the sign up process.

What do you think?

Am I missing something very obvious here?

2010-04-21T01:15:00.001+05:30

Sometimes when I click on the Sign In link on the twitter page, I am taken to the old twitter login page instead of getting the sign in control at the home page. However, there is something which I noticed right now, which I found very strange. The twitter login page does not use https: but uses simple http: .Check out the screenshot below

Contrast this to the login page of Google, where you can clearly see the https and the secure seal on the browser.

Did someone at twitter just forget about the whole https thing? Has this gone unnoticed for this long? Or am I missing something very obvious over here?

Absolutely Brilliant

2010-04-14T01:22:00.001+05:30

I came across this youtube video in a tweet. This is simply amazing and it expresses a lot of what I have felt developing applications to work in IE. The composition is awesome and well sung!

Entrepreneurship in India – The role of mainstream media

2010-04-05T14:44:00.001+05:30

The Economic Times had a story yesterday on the growing popularity of group buying sites in India. I do not read the Economic Times daily and definitely not from end to end. I rely mostly on recommendations from people I follow on twitter or my friends. But I had completely forgotten that there are other people I know who read ET.

In the afternoon, I got a call from my grandfather who asked me what was I upto and how was my work coming along. I updated him about my plans. As always, he asked me to focus on my health and have a clear mind on whatever I was planning to do. He then told me about the story he had read in ET about group discount sites. He thought the whole idea of group buying through a website was very innovative. He then encouraged me to be positive and continue my work with a positive frame of mind as there were a lot of opportunities, evident from the success of group buying sites.

The key learning from this incident was the importance of the mainstream media in promoting entrepreneurship in India. One of the biggest barriers to start an entrepreneurial journey in India is the social cost that entrepreneurs have to pay, highlighted well in this article by Gautam Gandhi of Google. Most people who aspire to be entrepreneurs in India follow blogs like pluggd.in, participate in forums like VentureWoods or network with others in organizations like TiE. At such places, the people you interact with are inherently entrepreneurial who understand the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur in India. However, the general junta does not read pluggd.in and it can be sometimes difficult for entrepreneurs to explain what they are trying to achieve.

Here comes the role of mainstream media. If I had told my grandfather about the concept of group buying sites and its potential, it would not have carried the same weight as the story in ET. That is the power of mainstream media. People associate a news story with prestige and if entrepreneurs are covered in ET then surely entrepreneurship must be prestigious.

It takes time for new ideas to be accepted in society. The idea of a private sector job over a government job was unthinkable in the 90’s for most. However, now you have IAS officers quitting their government positions to go through the one year program at ISB to prepare themselves for a private sector job. Similarly, the idea of quitting your job and jumping into the uncertain world of entrepreneurship was and in many cases still is unthinkable. But surely, with coverage like the one in ET yesterday, the unthinkable shall become the acceptable pretty soon.

The path of the Doer

2010-03-05T02:37:00.001+05:30

I read the following at some blog or site. I can’t remember exactly where. But I really liked it. It was titled “The Path of the Doer”

Set yourself a goal.

Set yourself a deadline.

Define success at the start.

Make a plan to make it happen.

Build a team to help you.

Get the team to sign up, head and heart, to the plan.

Understand there will be hurdles, barriers. Accept them. But defeat them.

Work each day toward getting things done. A little can do a lot.

Keep the end goal in your mind at all times.

Understand the importance of your energy. Your stubbornness. Your persistence.

Half way through a project is always the lowest point. You are neither at the start, nor at the end. Energy dips, morale is low. Have a day off.

The next day remind yourself why you started it in the first place.

Focus. Focus. Focus. But focus on the most important thing.

Tell the world what you are doing.

Tell the world your deadline.

Celebrate progress. Any progress.

Never give up.

Look back at how far you have traveled. It will surprise you.

It will also tell you that you are closer to your goal than ever before.

Keep going.

Then one day, after many, many days, you will complete your goal.

You got there in the end.

Your words and your deeds are one. Most people in life are just talkers. But you are a doer. Well done.

by David Hieatt

Howdy!

2010-03-03T01:21:00.001+05:30

It’s been a while since the last post. I do have a lot to share and I will do that in the coming weeks. Reading the blogs of others, I have come to realize that my writing skills need to improve. And the best way is to blog.

Some of the things you can expect from now on:

A post every fortnight. Could be anything, though I have decided that I am going to play the analyst and the critic.

You could read book reviews once in a while.

And for those of you who are wondering where have I disappeared, please follow me on twitter.

Cheers!

Just an Update

2009-07-16T19:54:00.001+05:30

What have I been up to over the last couple of days? Well I was trying to understand the ASP.NET MVC framework and how it works. I have been hearing a lot about (seeing/reading a lot about?) the ASP.NET MVC framework and wanted to gauge whether I should switch over to MVC framework for my latest project. After all, its supposed to be more maintainable, supports TDD and gives you greater control over the html which is generated. Plus my friend who will be helping me with this project is a java developer and the web application to him means MVC.

However, having seen a couple of videos where a sample data driven application was built using MVC, I realized that for now I am sticking with webforms. I am just so used to it that it will take time to switch. And I don't have the time. Not right now! Switching over to MVC has its obvious advantages, but the time taken to learn it just outweighs those advantages. So webforms it is for the time being.

Now that I decided on webforms, I started getting my hands dirty doing database design. A part of it is proving to be more challenging than I initially thought. Anyway I have decided on the db and now plan to upload some data to validate the design. This is a real pain. The data is available as static text and I need to manually recognize various fields from that text and write (cut and paste) those values in a spreadsheet. This is such a pain. I wish I did not have to do it manually, but cant help it. Of course I am looking at ways to automate the whole process but I think it will take time. Right now I just need to get the data in the database so I can continue building my app.

Of course I will also need to build a utility to upload data to the db from excel. Reminds me of the pdm_upload utility that came with Service Desk. That experience of bulk data uploading is going to come handy now :). So I got my hands full for the time being. That's good! There are a whole lot of other things to take care of as well.

Which Development Model To Use?

2009-07-14T17:25:00.001+05:30

One of the first things that you are taught as a fresher in a IT Services company is the Software Development Life Cycle, popularly know in the industry as SDLC. You are taught various models that companies follow while developing software, the Waterfall model probably being the most common of them. It is a slow and heavy model, pretty much like an IL-76 transport aircraft - Good when you are transporting heavy stuff (similar to good when you are developing huge applications). But if you are a startup or a lone developer you really don't need the IL-76 to get where you want. What you really need is a Sukhoi 30!

Looking at various Agile Development Models, I stumbled upon SCRUM. I read about it in Wikipedia and then did some more research on it by googling it. The way the whole model has been explained is very simple and I developed a liking for it when I read it the first time. Simple and clear, no bullshit!

The interesting part was that the typical team size for the development team was 5-9 people. I wondered whether I should try my hands at this because my team right now is pretty much me. However, knowing the importance of documentation and how it will help later when the team size grows, I thought of giving it a try. I started writing the product backlog.

A couple of days into writing the product backlog I realized I was wasting precious time. What was important at this point was to get the first stage of the product ready. Documentation can be done whenever I get the time but the focus has to be on developing the prototype of the product. No wonder they mentioned a typical team size. So until my team reaches that size, I will be loosely following the SCRUM model. That is to say, I will be simply deciding what I am going to do in the next 15 days and then do it. Simple.

So it begins!

2009-07-11T10:12:00.001+05:30

Yesterday was my last working day at HSC, the place where I started my career, just over three years ago. I still remember very well my first day. Its like it was just yesterday, but it wasn't. It was three years ago. It is said Einstein explained his Theory of Relativity to a lay person thus: If you are sitting for an hour on a park bench with someone you love, it seems like a minute; If you are sitting for a minute with someone you hate, it seems like an hour! How quickly these three years passed is unbelievable, so I guess I was having a nice time there.

So what now? Where to next? That only time will tell, but hopefully I will be able to achieve something of what I set out to achieve. Whatever it is, it is going to be the ride of a lifetime. You really can't take risks when you got other things to take care of. But I don't right now. So even if I hurt myself, which seems a very likely possibility, its fine. I can bounce back. But lets hope I don't hurt myself that badly.

Whatever the case, I am going to write about it here! Share my experience of starting up, so that it may help and perhaps inspire others to take the leap of faith. Just like reading others' experience inspired me to. Hopefully it will be helpful.

I have a request for you though! If you read a post, please do comment something. It motivates me to write when I know people are reading it. Plus, now I don't have company gossip or coffee breaks or office communicator to reach out to people. Starting can be get really lonely at times (more on that in another post). So please do comment and keep the interaction going.

To end, there were a lot of people who said/mailed a lot of "all the best" to me but there were two that will motivate me the most in the dark times.

They said:

Hope all your dreams come true. Good luck!

May the force be with you!

and the other one --

I would like to share a saying I came cross last week

“Life is a profound book. Other’s notes cannot replace your own understanding. May you find and create something new in it.”

Where are we headed anyway?

2009-06-28T18:33:00.001+05:30

Have you played Warcraft or Age of Empires? Not that I am a big fan of Strategy games but I have played them and pretty much liked them. So if you have played one of these strategy games, then you surely must have mined gold. I mean one of the things that you do in these games is explore territory and find new sources of wealth. Warcraft mostly used to have gold-mines and as soon as a new map starts, you would start exploring it looking for sources of wealth. Invariably, the mine that you started at beginning of the stage would collapse in the middle and if you hadn't found the next gold-mine it was pretty much game over. The good thing was that the people who designed the game made sure that there were enough mines in a map for you to survive and cross that particular stage.

But is that the case in our world? Have the designers of this game put enough resources on our planet for us to keep going on and on? China and India are the two most populous nations in the world. They are also the the two of the fastest growing economies of the world. The United States is the benchmark of prosperity for the world. But it is also the biggest consumer in the world. China, India and the others are expected to catch up with the US in the next 20-30 years. So the most populous nations in this world are going to catch up with the nation which consumes the most resources of our planet. God help our natural resources!

Just like Warcraft though, we would also move out to other areas in search of resources. India was already talking of mining the moon for some isotope of Helium, when our first moon mission went ahead last year. So once we have exhausted the resources on earth, we would move to the moon, mars and god knows where else just to keep ourselves going. Surely that is the way forward for the progressive human race.

You must have seen the blockbuster movie of the 90's, INDEPENDENCE DAY, starring Bill Pullman as the president of the United States. In one of the scenes, the president is communicating with one of the captured aliens. He explains to his associates, "They move from planet to planet. They consume all the resources in one planet and then they move on to the next. They don't want peace." Well, makes me wonder whether the president of some alien planet is going to say the same thing about invading humans in the future.

The way we are going about things is disgusting at times. Take the development of around Delhi for instance. Concrete Jungles coming in every place. That alone increases the temperature of of the already hot city. What do we do keep it cool then? We install air-conditioners. Earlier only a few people could afford it, but now thanks to our prosperity almost everyone wants an AC. And how do we power up these ACs? We burn more and more fossil fuels to produce electricity and in the process produce a lot more C02. Well one fine day there won't be anymore fuels to burn and if we haven't found an alternative source of energy, cities like Delhi would be pretty much inhospitable. The current power situation in Delhi is a warning for what could be in store. It is what actually triggered this post.

Scientists and engineers came up with the air-conditioner as an answer to the heating and cooling problems of your home. But it is not a solution which we can use on a mass scale. So over the years they have been working on alternatives and one very impressive alternative is Passive Solar Building Design. I saw a program on Discovery Channel which showcased a company which was implementing such techniques in New York City.

Perhaps we shouldn't be worried about it after all. Somebody will surely come up with an answer. There is a certain degree of uncertainty involved there. What if no one did? In a very short span of time on this planet, we humans have had the most impact on it. No doubt then that we are part of the problem. However if there is a solution then it has to come for us.

So what does the future hold for us? Where are we headed? I guess only time will tell!

Fighting the Pandemic

2009-06-25T11:51:00.001+05:30

Well, finally some thoughts have turned into action. Started this website providing information on who to contact, procedure at hospital etc. in case you are suspected to have swine flu. Realized getting this information is a big hassle when my room-mate was suspected to have contracted the h1n1 virus. All turned out to be ok, but we decided to come up with the site. Do give it a spin. Its called Swinefluindia ! Send you comments to swinefluindia <at> gmail dot com.

PS: The site still has a few rough edges, but we're working on it.

How advertising inadvertently sometimes sends the wrong message

2009-06-21T21:02:00.001+05:30

I dont't know how many of you have seen the latest ad of IE8. It shows a hot chick enjoying her ice cream and a guy sitting at a distance enjoying the sight and apparently fantasizing. However, a fat man comes and stands in the middle and and the guy sitting cannot see the girl anymore and is understandably disgusted. Fantasies can crash - the message is flashed. An IE8 popup saying "Your last browsing session ended unexpectedly", with the options "Restore Session" and "Go to Home Page", is shown. Obviously the "Restore Session" option is chosen and the guy can see the girl smiling at him. He heaves a sigh of relief. Automatic Crash Recovery in the next generation Internet Explorer 8. Let's you start from where you stopped.
The ad is trying to showcase a new feature in IE8 - Automatic Crash Recovery. The way the ad has been shot will surely get your attention. And then you get to know about the new feature in IE8. Cool way to advertise - or should I say hot?
Well, I happened to upgrade my IE7 to IE8 a few days back. But as soon as I started with IE8, it crashed. Of course the crash recovery option came up when i restarted and it promptly restored my session, which was nothing but my facebook homepage. But guess what, it crashed again and I restored the session again and it crashed again. This went on and on for a couple of minutes after which I switched back to Chrome and Firefox. Smooth sailing, no more crashes. So when this morning I saw that ad and the message "Fantasies can crash", I was like "Sure they can crash! If you are using IE. If you dont want them to crash, use something else!"
The interesting point here was I perceived the ad in a completely different way because I had a previous negative experience. But my question is, should one advertise such a feature? I don't see it as a nice feature because it reminds me that this piece of software crashes. All software do, including Firefox and Chrome, but why highlight it? By advertising the Automatic Crash Recovery you are in a way highlighting the fact that your software crashes. As a user I see this as a negative rather than a positive feature.
Is such advertising good? What do you think?

Packaging Your Product/Service

2009-06-21T20:38:00.001+05:30

Towards the end of the first edition of the IPL, it was clear that the Bangalore team would finish in the bottom half of the table. One of my friends was booking tickets for the last match to be played at Chinnaswamy stadium and asked if I wanted to come. "What's the use? Anyway RCB are going to lose!" was my response. "Who is going to watch cricket? I am going to watch the cheerleaders" That was an example of how successful had the marketing of IPL been. They attracted customers not just for cricket (the core focus)but for the cheerleaders (add ons) as well!

Discussing the launch of bing, a friend said she had made Bing her homepage because she loved the scenic background pictures of the bing page. The background pictures on the bing page change every few hours, prompting her to visit it every now and then. Here Microsoft used the changing background (add on) to attract customers to search using bing (core focus).

While building a great product or service (core focus) is important in the long run, innovative packaging of your product or service can help you create the initial buzz.

Do you feel such a strategy could prove useful for start-ups? What do you think?

Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP 1

2008-09-20T17:03:00.002+05:30

The Service Pack 1 for Visual Web Developer 200 Express was released sometime back by Microsoft. I upgraded my VWD 2008 to SP1. This now allows me to have multiple projects within the same solution. This feature was not present in any of the express editions and is a welcome addition.

Earlier if you wanted to build separate class library projects for Data Access and Business Logic, you could not do so in Express editions. What one had to do was to create different sub-folders within the App-Code directory and code the classes in these sub-folders. The problem with this was that if your application was big then compiling the whole thing took a lot of time. With different projects you can easily separate your classes which allows for fast compiling and easy debugging.

With SP1, the Entity Data Framework has also been added. I had seen a video on Entity Framework at asp.net and this was something which I would love to explore.

There must be other feature enhancements, which I haven't looked at right now. But if you haven't upgraded to SP1, I suggest you do so!

All India Anti Terrorist Front - Website Hacked?

2008-09-15T23:05:00.001+05:30

After the Delhi blasts, I was discussing with my friends that what could be done by the people to fight terrorism. During this discussion, All India Anti Terrorist Front was mentioned. I remember the organization had its office near Mandir Marg, New Delhi because it used to be on the way to my uncle's house. I was wondering what was this organization doing in the wake of recent terror attacks. So I googled to find their website. And guess what I found?

The site is marked as harmful by Google. When you click on the link of the site you get the following warning.

I wanted to be surprised, but given the hi-tech nature of the terrorists, I was not. This organization seems to be defunct and dead. Do any of you know of any similar organization? What can we do to fight terrorism?

ZedGraph : A Useful Graphing Control

2008-09-13T13:37:00.001+05:30

In one of my recent projects, an aspx page had to have a graph which would indicate the performance of the system being monitored. This had to be developed quickly, so I was looking for a free graph control which I could use. And I came across ZedGraph, the open source graph control developed for .NET. There were other alternatives as well, but the good thing about Zedgraph was the documentation and examples given. With these I was able to develop what seemed like the most complicated piece of software in a matter of hours.

Zedgraph is a really flexible graphing control with lot of options. You can have line graphs, bar graphs, or any other type of graph that you may think of, multiple Y axes, multiple curves, different types of X axes from time based scaling to logarithmic scaling. For a free control it really provides a lot of features that will fulfill all your essential requirements.

So, if you are searching for a Free Graph control, I suggest you give Zedgraph a try.

WANNABEs

2008-08-16T03:47:00.001+05:30

After a very long time, I was catching up with the news and happenings of the technology world thanks to the three day Independence Day weekend. I read this post on WATBLOG about Live Search and its new features. It is titled "Microsoft Live Search - will it steal the show?". I just wanted to discuss whatever has been written.

I always knew LIVE Search’s algorithm was as good as the other alternatives (Read:Google) - I had done enough trail-n-error to prove this - but users have been slow in adopting.

The author says that LIVE's search algorithm was as good as other alternatives (Read:Google). Every now and then when I get bored, I do test the prominent players in search to see whether anyone has caught up with Google. I did this recently when Cuil was launched and hailed as David who would take down Goliath. Of course, the results were far from satisfactory. Nothing compared to Google! Yahoo was pretty reasonable and Live Search wasn't as bad as it was 6-7 months back. And Cuil was over-hyped, thought they have improved a lot since then.

But when I read the post on WATBLOG, I decided to test once again and put up the results for people to decide. The latest hero for India is our very own Abhinav Bindra. Lets see how does Live Search fare against Google when you Search Abhinav Bindra (supposedly its algorithm is as good).

First, let us look at Live Search. It gives information about him from NBCOlympics.com. Cool! Isn't it? That is what one would think. But if you knew that NBC is using Silverlight for its Olympics site, you can easily do the Math as to why that particular site is showing as the first result. It is not the result of the as good algorithm used by Live Search, but is actually a strategy to get as many desktops installed with Silverlight as possible. That is why nbcolympics comes at the top. Secondly, the next result that you see is that of wikipedia. The snapshot shows that Abhinav was born in the year 1983. I will come this later. Thirdly, I went till the third page to see if his blog has been listed in the results. But why should it be? Our as good algorithm does not see it fit to be listed in the first three pages.

Let us now have a look at what Google gives us.

As you can see, Google gives the first Links as News Results and a YouTube link before that but very nicely places it as a Sponsored Link. But that is insignificant, and people's views on it will always differ. What I am concerned about are the results! Even here you get the first link as Wikipedia but a closer look reveals that Abhinav's year of birth to be 1982. How is this possible, as both results point to the same page? That is because the Google results are the latest. Also, his blog is listed in the first page as the fifth result. While the champ is not giving the TV media any masala to broadcast and is happy to be himself, he is connecting to his many fans and well wishers through his blog. While this really is an example of the power of Web 2.0, his blog is not listed in the results of our as good algorithm.

And not just with Abhinav Bindra, try any other search term and you will find that Google lies way ahead of Microsoft. When you search for any ASP.NET related query, Google would give you forums.asp.net in its first page and would always give a result which you are looking for. Live Search did not even show forums.asp.net in its first three pages till recently. However, they have improved but still have a very long way to go.

The usability changes done to the LIVE search are just wonderful. Add a lot of value to the user.

I have to agree that the Video and Image Search was indeed impressive. They are certainly trying new things or as one would say in Hindi "Haanth Paon to maar rahe hain".It will be interesting to see how do they fare but without a competetive algorithm, presentation is going to be useless.

Local Search

Hmmm, three taps in my room were leaking today. Stuff in my room were floating. I wanted a plumber. Heck, I needed a plumber. I didn’t know just hours later, I;m gonna witness something which could have helped me. Googling for plumbers in Mumbai is hardly useful, as you might know. So, what ? Well, plumbers in Bandra is what I was looking for. This was exactly what was demonstrated to me by Ravi, today at Microsoft. Putting in a search query like this, gives you names and numbers of the relevant services in that area. I actually noted down a number.

Although it’s not actually a unique feature. Asklaila has been doing it for ages now. And even Google local results can show you ones. Just that Microsoft LIVE search results were more relevant and they could be done right from the main Live.com interface. You don’t need to know of a different sub domain (like local.google.com) to perform the search. An incremental improvement.

Googling for plumbers in Mumbai is hardly useful, as you might know. Well that is exactly what I did!

But first let us look at Live results. It does give local listings with address and phone numbers. But it gives only three results. No link for more results or similar results. What about Google?

It gives about 12 results with phone numbers but without any addresses. But it does give you a more results link.And mind you I did not do a local search from a subdomain. And what happens when you click on it?

It takes you to local.google.co.in and gives you 218 results with addresses and phone numbers. Isnt that better? And since we are talking about relevant local results I tried another thing which really was the nail on the coffin for the as good alogrithm. I searched for "The Dark Knight in Bangalore" in both Live Search and Google. The results are below.

Just one result for Live Search. And Google....

..gives me the show timings for cinemas in Bangalore along with about 105,000 results. Phew!

So there you are! Now what prompted me to write this article? People might think that I am one of those Google fans and Microsoft haters. Well I am not! Google is simply a far better search engine at this point than any other, and Microsoft knows this. That is why all the hullabaloo to buy Yahoo! It is playing catch up but still has a long way to go. But it certainly does have the capability to play a hard game. Just look at them! From OSs to Databases to Enterprise Software to Developer Tools, they are everywhere.

But what really peeved me was this. The author has written a lot of misleading things and the tone of the post is completely biased. And he is not ready to acknowledge this!

Wherever I see, I just find WANNABE's!

Upgrading from SQL Server 2005 Express to SQL Server 2008 Express CTP

2008-07-20T12:37:00.001+05:30

I currently have SQL Server 2005 Express Edition installed on my system. I also have the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Beta 1 installed, but while installing it I did not choose for SQL Server 2008 Express to be installed. So now I am going to try and install it separately. This post is about what I am doing on my system and the steps here may not work in your case. But still I am putting it up as a reference.

Go to the Microsoft Express editions site and click on download SQL Server 2008 CTP. Also back up your existing databases. One thing I have learnt in the industry is that it is never too expensive to keep backups. Always keep a backup, at least for those things that you feel are critical.

After you have downloaded the setup, when you execute it, the first screen you get is the EULA.

Read the License at least once. Most of us don't read and select the I accept terms checkbox and click next. By reading I do not mean understand each and every thing, but just skim through it once to see if it contains anything that might interest you. e.g The above License says that it is valid till July 25, 2008, which is not very far and that the software will stop working after 180 days since installation. These are things which caught my eye.

When you proceed you get the following screen.

I clicked on Install and then get the following screen.

I see the option of Upgrade SQL Server 2005 to 2008 which says I should run the Update Advisor first. I can't find the Update Advisor so I just select the option to see what happens. It opens a new windows where it checks my system. In the options on the left side of the Wizard I can see Select instance, meaning I would have to select my SQL Server 2005 Instance which I want to upgrade. Since I came across this post in ASP.NET forums, I am not sure that is what I want to do. Plus there is nothing wrong in having both the versions of SQL Server running as different Instances. At work, I have seen people with both SQL 2000 and 2005 on their systems. So I cancel the Wizard and then in the window above I select New Installation.

I get the System Configuration Check again which is Successful. But now on the left side in the steps, I DO NOT see Select Instance. So my guess is that this is going to install a new Instance of SQL Server 2008 and not do anything to SQL Server 2005 already alive and kicking. I click on Next.

I select all the options and click on Next. (Actually I had already clicked on Next and moved to the Next Step when I realized that I had not taken the screen shot of the step. So I moved to previous one to take the screen shot. But notice that in the steps on the left, the Next Step is already checked. A BUG!)

Instead of Default Instance, I select Named Instance and Give it a new name SQL2008CTP. I can see 2 existing Instances towards the bottom, one of which is SQL 2005 instance.

Next it is asking for the User Name and Password (Credentials) to configure the service. Provide the appropriate details. You are then shown the screen below for database engine configuration.

I chose the mixed mode authentication. I am no DB guy and I do this because one of my first mentors told me that always choose Mixed Mode.

I then get a screen above for sending data to MSFT. I click on Next.

I then get the summary of the Installation order.I click Install to begin the installation.

Above is a screen shot I took while the installation was in progress. Though the progress bar did not reach 100% the next button was enabled and the progress bar remained that way for quite some time so I just pressed next to go the following screen.

I then go to services.msc and check if the service has been installed.

As you can see, now there are three instances of SQL Server running. So SQL2008CTP seems to be running fine along with SQLEXPRESS which is SQL Server 2005 Express. I now go to SQL Server Management Studio Express but I cant find the 2008 CTP instance I just installed. So I think I should restart my computer once. It is always better to restart in my experience.

I restarted and checked but still I don't see the 2008 CTP instance in Management Studio Express, probably because the Management Studio Express is and older version and may not recognize newer versions of SQL Server. So now I open VWD 2008 Express Beta 1 and go to Database Explorer and try to add a new connection.

As expected I can see the 2008 CTP instance I installed. I provide the sa login and password and select tempdb database and test the connection and Voila!

So things seem to be working fine. Phew!

Hope this was helpful! Please comment if you have any queries.

Firefox 3 launch Goof up?

2008-06-18T00:14:00.002+05:30

Many a times when techies talk about goof ups and product launches, they remember the OS crashing at the launch of Microsoft Windows 98, the video of which I have included just in case you forgot about it.

While that certainly is something which will probably rank first in the list of product launches and goof-ups, we have another one today.

Yes, today is Download Day. I did get the mail on time reminding me about the download. But there has been a goof up in this all hyped Guinness style product launch.

As you can see in the above screen shot, I have showed you the mail which I got informing of the download time. There when I hover above the link download Firefox 3, I get the url on the status bar of the browser which I have encircled.

Now, when I go to the same url what do I get?

Firefox 2?? You got to be kidding me!! And all we get is a sneak peek into Firefox 3, to test drive the latest version.

Probably, the guys at Mozilla were so busy counting the numbers pledged for the download that they forgot to make the to do list, or worse they made the to do list and forgot to update the page that the url redirects to.

I dont know what was the mistake and who made it, but you sure dont want to this to happen when you are publicizing the event with the Guinness tag attached to it!

So what do you guys think went wrong?

My Date with the VC's

2008-06-14T19:29:00.001+05:30

As I had said in one of my previous posts, one fine Saturday I had been to an event called Startup City organized by the The Smart Techie. I had mailed a few of my friends about the event and lured a few of them to wake up early on a Saturday morning. I almost did not make it, as I was feeling very sleepy and did not feel like getting up, but since I had promised NEO that I would be picking him up around 8:00 am I got up and got ready. We reached 10 minutes before the start of the event and decided to have breakfast somewhere. By the time we were finished with our Masala Dosas and Musambi Juice it was well past 9:30. I had already missed the event which I had come for, opening address by Mr. Ashish Gupta about the milestones in the journey from an idea to a successful venture. When I reached, a techie from Sun Microsystems was talking about how Sun can help startups. Frankly, it was more of a marketing presentation which I did not find very riveting.

I moved around the stalls where some startups were displaying their products and services. It reminded me of BangaloreIT.In of 2006 where Darshan and me had gone though the venue this time was very small as compared to that. You can read about the exhibiting startups here. I then went in to the room where you could meet the VC's. People from different Venture Capital firms from over India were present.

I must say that never before has there been a better time to start a company. With 13 Venture Capital firms, each planning to invest around a million dollars per annum into new Ventures in India, you have approximately 10 million dollars of Venture Capital flowing in. That is huge! And it is not just for the technology companies!

So what did I get to know in my date with the VC's? I have put them down in points as follows:

They got the money and they are looking for ventures to invest.
An Idea is not good enough! They need a Proof of Concept!
If you worry about the hassles of managing things like marketing, finance etc., don't worry. They have their networks and will help you find people who can help you manage aspects of your company.
They are looking to invest in areas which have a proven market and growth areas. So in case you have something revolutionary as Google, don't expect it to be easy to get funded.
People in their network help them to evaluate their ideas. e.g. if I have been funded by a VC and have been successful, she may ask me to evaluate your idea.
Be as frugal as you can.

One very important thing that I noticed there was that there were quite a lot of people there who had already started off something and were looking for venture capital to expand. I mean like anything else in India, the competition to get a slice of the VC pie is hot here as well. But that doesn't mean you wont get a slice.

All said and done, it is always good to be aware of what is happening in the world. I became aware of a whole range of things thanks to event.

So, what do you feel about the points I mentioned above?

Guinness World Records

2008-06-14T18:37:00.002+05:30

If you have studied MIT, Manipal around the same time that I did, you would think I was talking about the successful attempt by students of MIT to break the Guinness World Record for the longest chain of straws in the world. Around 1500 or so students of MIT joined hands and made a straw chain of over 8 kilometers if I remember correctly, breaking a record by made by some 16 school kids in the US. The record made has already been broken by someone else quite a while back, though I think it still holds good in the Limca Book of Records.

So how did a thousand students decide to come together to break into the Guinness Book of World Records? Was Manipal such a boring and dull place that the restlessness of the students got the better of them? Well, by no means is Manipal dull. With just students it is one of the most vibrant and energetic places to study in India.

The Guinness World Record attempt was a branding and marketing strategy by my old pal Rishabh Sachdeva, for the inaugural edition of techtatva. He wanted to create a niche brand for the event among other similar events in the region, and if I may say so, it is one of the most successful marketing and branding strategies that you will come across. Not only did it generate a buzz within Manipal, but was also responsible for attracting sponsorship for the inaugural edition of the event. Without this strategy I wonder how would the sponsors have looked at the event which was happening for the first time! The sheer genius of the idea is why I would have Rishabh be the marketing and strategy guy if I were to start a company some day.

Anyway, the idea behind the post was not to discuss about Rishabh or Manipal, but how Guinness World Records provide a great way to market your product. That is what Mozilla Foundation is doing by targeting for the maximum number of downloads in 24 hours for Firefox 3.They are calling this initiative as Download Day, which is on June 17. I have tried the beta version and it was pretty impressive. It is supposed to be fastest browser till date. I have already pledged my support for the initiative. What are you waiting for?

What's Cooking?

2008-06-09T23:42:00.001+05:30

Now that the IPL is over, what am I up to these days? Well, last week I was completely involved in understanding the concepts and implementation of a 3 tier architecture using C# in an ASP.NET application. In fact, I had started on this subject about two weeks back and I am quite satisfied with the progress over the last the last two weeks. But more detailed posts on that may not be coming anytime soon as I have some other engagements till July.

Meanwhile, another news is that I have invested a heavy chunk of my savings in buying a Lenovo Ideapad Y500.Why the need for a notebook PC? Well first of all, I was kind of bored with my desktop. It has been a very good companion for the past five years and has been party to many memorable times, but was somewhat losing its charm. Secondly, there were issues with the Ethernet Card which really started to get on my nerves. Thirdly, and most importantly, I felt the need for a notebook PC. This was because earlier I was not at a level to use my desktop for writing code or anything like that. In fact, I did not write a blog as frequently and never felt that I needed my stuff with me all the time wherever I am. But lately, I have been having an itch for such an arrangement and decided that it was time to graduate to the next level. Plus Notebooks have a very different feel to them don't they!

So I guess now that I have a Notebook, you would expect a lot more blogs and info from me. Well, I don't blame you, especially given the fact that I am writing this blog using Windows Live Writer, a special editor especially for writing blogs easily. And I must confess, that the experience has been good so far. One of the only problems is that the Ideapad shipped with Windows Vista Home. I had heard a lot of people criticize Vista and after using it, I can see why. You will be a bit challenged by the OS and some of its irritating features like User Access Control, which prompts you for your permission every time you start a installation or a program. True that it improves the security vastly, but I was beginning to wonder what was better, being irritated by the security alerts every now and then and being secure or just plain and simple reinstalling Windows whenever you had taken a bad hit from a Virus attack. Or as some of my friends would say, use Mac or Ubuntu.

Anyway, I guess I am getting used to it. The UI certainly makes it a nice experience and goes to show how rich applications are going to be the driving force for developers in the next few years.

Here's a picture of mine clicked from the webcam. This is just to test how easy is it to post pictures using Live writer. It may look as if I am sleeping but my head is positioned in such a way that it looks like that. When I was in school, I was reading a book kept on my lap rather than on the desk and my head was straight but my eyes were down on the book. The teacher thought that I was sleeping but was surprised when I responded to the question that was asked. I told her that I was merely referring to the book. Later on I have used the same ploy many a times and teachers have never been able to make out if I was sleeping or awake! (At least no one has ever asked me not to sleep in the class or go and wash my face. My aunt thinks that's because I look like a cute baby when I am asleep(Ahem! Are the girls listening??)and no one would want to wake me up.)BTW, the notebook has a face recognition software which is pretty cool.

I had been to an event organized by The Smart Techie in Bangalore focusing on Startups. My friend Darshan Santani had asked me how was my date and I am yet to respond to him. Will be doing that in the next post soon.

And lots more coming on 3 tier architecture and Object Oriented Design in the weeks to follow. Cheers!!

What have I been upto?

2008-05-11T19:21:00.002+05:30

There haven't been many posts in the past few weeks. I had promised that I would post a few things about UI and Web Designing but haven't done that as yet. I will definitely write a post about Web Designing within the next 2 months. But right now that is not what I am doing. I am learning UML.

Why this sudden change of course, like an aircraft on autopilot, whose autopilot program was infected with a virus? Well, there was a training being held on UML and sighting the opportunity I jumped right in. Now, I already had had a training on UML when I joined my company but that was a long time back and I hardly used UML in the past one and a half years. (I guess hardly would be a blatant exaggeration, but anyway!) So I decided to refresh my concepts and enjoy the 2 day break from work. Moreover, having just finished the first version of the application that I was working on at work, I thought it would be a really nice time to learn how can I use UML in action.

The problem with these trainings is that they start at wee hours of the morning (come on, 9:30 am is toooo damn early) and you have to reach on time. To reach on time you also have to get up early because you dont want to get caught in the rush hours (8-10:15 am). So you see how much of an ordeal these trainings are! Still, for both the days I managed to reach on time. The very first day as I entered the training room I was greeted with the familiar sight of our trainer. He was the same guy who had conducted training almost 2 year ago. I wondered if he would remember me.

After the introductions I was pretty sure that he did not remember me as he went on with his lecture. Man I hate lectures! Why can't they be more interactive and give you a problem and then have discussions on how to solve it and explain the theory along with that? Still I was intrigued by the object orientation concepts he was talking about, which was a very good refresher and managed to stay focussed. But when he started off with the History of UML, I could not help myself and however hard I tried I lost my concentration and was feeling drowsy. I guess my sleepy face was enough to ring a bell in the instructor's mind of having faced something similar sometime before and he quickly moved on to UML diagrams. The 2 days on UML was not enough but it was a good refresher and the best part was that we got UML in a Nutshell by O'Reilly as the Reference Material. Also this time the audience in the training was a nice mix of people, from varying backgrounds and experiences so some of the discussions were enlightening.

In the end, the training was over and I was happy to have attended it and gained from it. But as with all trainings, if you do not apply what you have learned then with time you will forget. So I decided to put other things on the back burner for the time being and decided to learn a bit of UML.(The keywords there were BIT OF)

There is an opportunity to put what I have learned into practice so I guess would be a bit tied up. But that is what I have been up to lately.

One of the interesting things to come out of the training was looking at Systems from an Object Oriented point of view. I sort of have been doing that but you will not find any pure classes in my application for real world entities. More on this on the next post where I will talk about using Typed Data Sets vs Custom Business Objects in your application. But the object oriented approach has thrown a few questions to me for which I haven't been able to find any answers till now. All this and more coming up in future posts.

Disappointment and Google Reader

2008-05-11T00:58:00.003+05:30

Why would I title my post as "Disappointment and Google Reader"? What were my expectations and why am I disappointed with Google Reader? Wait! I never said I was disappointed with google reader. In fact I am pretty satisifed ever since I started using it. I had wondered before how do RSS feeds work and what is their advantage? I had tried Google Reader a long time back when I was inept at understanding and using technology like geeks. I did not try to understand how does it work and left it. Recently, I got a mail from my old friend Darshan Santani where he had sent an article through Google Reader. This prompted me to try out Google Reader once more and so I logged in hoping I would get the hang of it now since I was a little less technically challenged.(I hope!) I really understood what RSS is and how it has lead to people sharing content over the web. It is just amazing but still very few people who browse the internet use it.

One thing that Feed Reader does is that it brings all the interesting content you would want to read under one roof. You can even share whatever you like with your friends or even with people who visit your site or blog. And so I have put Some Shared Sassy Articles for you on the side. It is nothing but what I share from my reader. You will find some interesting articles on various topics, mostly related to technology. Hope you like this new feature!

Coming back to disappointment, in my previous post I had mentioned about IPL and the fact that I was supporting the Royal Challengers from Bangalore. But being at the bottom of the table is not what I was expecting from them. I have been terribly disappointed and dont see how things are going to change.Dr. Mallya had fired the CEO Charu sharma and brought in Mr. Brajesh Patel as the new one in charge of the affairs expecting some change. But that didn't happen either. I 'don't see where will they go from here! Where will they get the change? Maybe Dr. Mallya should get Mr.Barack Obama to give a speech to the Royal Challengers on "Change We can Believe In!". The way he speaks might just be the pep talk that these guys need.

The Great Indian Developer Summit 08

2008-04-25T18:08:00.002+05:30

One of the best getaways when in office is to go to the International Tech Park (known popularly as ITPL) and have a Zinger Burger meal at KFC. Though there are other options like buffet at Sindbad, I really enjoy the Zinger Burger meal at KFC. Often I go to ITPL because I got some work at the bank and most of the times end up meeting old friends over a burger.

I went this week as well after quite some time and it was there I saw boards advertising The Great Indian Developer Summit. I always used to wonder when something like this will happen. The registrations for the event are pretty decent and you get early bird discounts if you register before 28 April.

Unfortunately, I might not be able to attend the summit but if you can do attend. And even if you are not attending do vote for your favorite tools and people.

The Indian Premier League has really spoiled the 3-4 hours of time after office and 6-8 hours on the weekends. I can't help but watch the matches and this is eating into my blogging time, so dont really expect many posts till June 1. And yeah FYI, I am supporting The Royal Challengers!

Apps on Orkut-Live in India!

2008-04-18T00:59:00.000+05:30

I remember the days when as a teenager I had created my VERY OWN email account. I used to accumulate money to go and check mail once a month at the nearby cyber cafe. Not that I expected any mails from anyone, but the whole concept of having an own email id was very thrilling for me at that time. Over the years, emails changed from being standard "How are you doing?" mails to long lost cousins in the distant US, to forwards about the whackiest things in the world from your not so distant schoolmates. Standard emails gave way to mailing lists and groups.

Then Web 2.0 happened and you had applications like Orkut and Blogger where your personal presence on the web grew from an email address to your own profile or blog. You could upload and share videos, photos and so much more. More and more people got hooked to the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

The evolution of Web 2.0 is still underway, as engineers around the world come up with ideas to increase the interactivity and richness of the web experience for the user. Facebook was the first one to come up with Social Apps which turned it into a huge phenomenon over a few months. Google had announced its own OpenSocial initiative a few months back. Today, the seeds sown months back have blossomed into flowery plants, as OpenSocial Apps goes Live in India!

This in my view is a defining moment which will change the way Indians surf the web. Orkut being the No. 1 Social Networking Site in India has created huge prospects for social applications. And what a way to boost its OpenSocial initiative! Though Facebook was catching up, it still had a long way to go to really threaten Orkut's dominance in India. With Orkut concentrating on launching Apps on Orkut in India first and then to the rest of the World, it is clear that the site does not take its No. 1 position in India for granted and is always working on ways to enrich the experience of its users, 10% of which are from India.

There are tremendous possibilities ahead and consumer internet in India is going to go to a whole new level because of this.

What a coincidence that IPL and Apps on Orkut are being launched around the same time! Both will change the way Indians kill their spare time for years to come!!

Upcoming Attractions

2008-04-11T02:54:00.003+05:30

Well, its been a long time since there was a post about Web Dev using ASP.NET! Sorry about that! Will be coming up with a few posts about Web Design using CSS pretty soon as that is something I have been trying lately.

Apart from that a few posts on ASP.NET as well, on what exactly I am not sure but will decide on as I write.

Also, I will be posting about something very intriguing I came across today! Right now , just posting this to let you know what to expect this month!

Save The Developers!!

2008-04-05T19:24:00.004+05:30

Who is after them anyway? Well, the day is not yet here when AI programs can create programs themselves and you don't need developers to code. We are still years from what I call "Matrix" era programs ending the era of developers building applications. So what is the threat to developers? While some may think I may be talking about the credit crunch and the ongoing cost cutting going on in companies, even that is not the case. It is about the Web!

Save The Developers is a movement to bring about browsers that are web standards compliant. What do I mean by this? Well if you go through the Browser Usage Statistics at W3schools you find that 30% of the users still use IE 6. So what is the problem with that? I realized the problem when, a sample UI I had made for a web app, on my system at work, which has IE 6, was run on a colleague's notebook which has IE 7. The layout was completely haywire! Even though the W3C is working to bring in standards across the web, many companies (read Microsoft ;) )have implemented rendering and other features in their own way. IE 7, thanks to Mozilla Firefox, is I heard (not confirmed) more standards compliant than IE 6. Microsoft also showcased IE 8 this year and said it will be their most standards compliant browser yet. Huh! What the hell was Microsoft doing till now providing its own standards? My guess is that because Microsoft used have the single largest share in the browser market, they really didn't bother about the standards. After all, during the OOXML and ODF ISO Standards debate, one of the arguments Microsoft was giving was that "Office dominates on the desktop worldwide and that OOXML is a de facto standard anyway."
Perhaps Microsoft thought that with IE being the single largest browser over the years, it had won the Battle for the Browser by defeating Netscape, and that the standards would change to what Microsoft preached. But with Mozilla Firefox teaming up with Google, a new challenger had come which seemed a potent threat to IE's domination. And it was as the statistics tell you. So while Microsoft may try and show a face that it really is concerned about developers and their call for standards compliance it is because of competition that Microsoft has been forced to change its ways.

All said and done, it means that we now have more standards compliant browser available, from Microsoft and other vendors as well. But still we have a long way to go before you have to stop worrying as a web developer/designer about IE 6. So join the movement and upgrade your browser! And save the developers!!

P.S: Personally I prefer Mozilla Firefox, which you can download by clicking on the banner at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, you may try the new Flock browser which you can download by clicking on the image to the right!

.NET and Open Source

2008-03-27T00:38:00.004+05:30

Generally one would not associate Microsoft .NET with open source. But I have come across 2 tools built on .NET which are Open Source and free to use.From the looks of it , they seem to be pretty impressive.I have used one of them PAINT .NET, which is an alternative for GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. I have never used Photoshp but seen some people use it. Paint .NET is pretty impressive in those terms. It may not the features the experts look for(don know coz its really not my cup of tea), but it sure has some nice features of an image editor. Here are some of my pics that I modified with it.

Impressive, isn't it? You can download it from getpaint.net. Another one is Creative Docs .NET. I haven't tried that one as yet but it should be as good I guess.

Orkut vs Facebook

2008-03-17T23:18:00.003+05:30

When you are surfing where do you spend most of your time? Chances are with the Web 2.0 revolution you must be spending a substantial amount of your time online on Social Networking Sites like Orkut or Facebook! Well for those who are unaware, Orkut is the social networking site by Google which is extremely popular in India and Brazil. Facebook is the Social Networking site by 26 year old Mark Zuckerberg that has taken the US and the rest of the world by storm! I do not have statistics as to which one is more popular in the world but probably Facebook is way ahead of Orkut.

But when it comes to India, most likely if you have an account on any Social Networking Site it has to be Orkut. Probably the Google factor is the reason why Orkut caught attention of us Indians before Facebook. Within no time, you were a loser if you did not have an Orkut account. It was the in-thing for the youth. People could catch up with long lost friends. In some cases, people would search for long lost teenage crushes (that boy or girl in school who made your heart beat like oscillations of pistons in a steam engine!) and be happy to see that the subject was still single and praise Orkut for the infinite possibilities it opened up or be heartbroken once again to find that the subject was committed with a sentimental testimonial thrown in from the subject's love interest and curse Orkut for ruining your dreams! For some it would be teasing another friend on receiving a scrap from a hot girl, only finding out later from another person that the girl was your friends sister! It was about snooping into what people are doing online, which basically was a reflection of what people were doing in their lives. It provided the much needed masala to gupshup or bakchodi between friends. The openness of Orkut was something which worried some but it was essentialy the spice that kept people hooked on to the site. I was one of the people hooked on to it. I have had some unpleasant experiences as well. But overall, it was THE way to kill time.

Slowly, the abuse of the openness started. And around the same time Facebook as an alternative to Orkut started gaining ground. People talked about how Facebook was the most popular social site in US. People who loved Orkut for what it was didn't bither about Facebook. But many people joined it just to give it a try. Slowly but surely the privacy issue was moving in favor of Facebook. Many more joined it and stopped frequenting their Orkut accounts.

As a response Orkut introduced many features to control who has access to do what. While this feature is welcome, it has taken away the openness that once provided the spice to Orkut. Now, chances are that the girl with the beautiful photograph does not wish to receive you scrap for friendship. You cant scrap and hence are not looking forward to any response. Such features are already present on Facebook. But what Facebook has done by opening up itself to applications by third parties is phenomenal. In Orkut you can scrap, participate in communities and see what others are upto.

In facebook, with 3rd party applications, you can go a step further and play online games with your friends. The experience on facebook is more interactive and enriching than Orkut. If you haven't tried facebook then try at your risk. I have got a taste of the blood it has to offer and I must say that it seemed pretty delicious. Orkut is fine but I believe it is losing out to facebook.

Unless Google does something about this, Orkut may lose the No. 1 spot in India as well to Facebook.

I've Been Fired!!

2008-03-15T16:34:00.003+05:30

That is what many people in the Indian IT industry will be saying this year according to The Times of India. The recent months has not been good for the Indian Techie. The feel good factor of being in the IT Industry has diminished for many, even gone for some. Recently about 1800 or so employees were fired within the span of a week from companies like TCS and IBM, or at least the news of firing from both the companies was reported within a week of each other. Yahoo India's firing of their employees and giving them just half an hour to pack their things and leave the premises was one of the points of discussion among techies in Namma Bengaluru and elsewhere, over coffee, lunch or the much awaited break for a smoke. Even people who are safely employed are not very optimistic. "Don't expect a good hike this year. IT Industry is in a slowdown.", a colleague warned me."Something to do with some sub-prime crisis in the US. The US economy is also heading into a recession." I expect to hear something similar maybe when I have my discussion with my employer regarding the annual hike.

You know the situation is bleak when instead of hearing news about people you don't know, you hear news about people you know (including you). One of my friends was told that his services would not be required after March when the client for which he was working decided to close the project ( The client was severely hit by the mortgage crisis.) Thankfully, he got another job with a better pay. But not everyone would be as lucky as him. What about the people who were fired by IBM and TCS? Many of them were not freshers but people in the middle management. To get fired at such a point in your career! This is new for many of us Indians. And what about the hundreds of students who are joining engineering colleges in the hope that someday they end up in TCS, Infy or Wipro? Colleges like Vellore and Manipal have increased their intake by great numbers in the past few years. Since more than 90% of the students used to get placed in companies and with newspapers carrying reports of shortage of skilled IT professionals the bodies running these institutions decided to cash in on the gold rush. I being an alumni of Manipal am still in touch with some of my juniors and hear how the college has changed. From almost 800 students graduating in 2006, about 2000 are expected to graduate in 2012! What a phenomenal increase, but what about placements. Will the services companies like TCS and Infy still continue to hire in the same way they used to until now. With already there being a lot of talk about cost cutting and reducing or even in some cases eliminating the bench strength of these companies, I doubt that they are going to be in a hiring spree they were in over the past few years. The bench strength no longer remains a strength but is a turning to be a liability.

In fact, at a placement party in college a friend observed how great it was to be passing out when the placement boom was there. Another guy agreed, but said he failed to understand why were companies hiring so many people when they had so many people on bench, to which he got the response "Why the hell do you care! Be happy you got placed and enjoy the booze." While all of us certainly enjoyed the booze, we did wonder time and again what the rational was behind this bench policy, because it didn't have any common sense element to it.

While attending an ITIL foundation training I sort of understood what the management of these companies thought. Most of these companies provide Services to their clients. They have a Service Catalog or a list of services which they currently provide and a Service Pipeline or services which they plan to offer in the future. When designing your service you take a lot of factors into account. One of them is the availability of resources to accomplish your tasks. In the tough and competitive world today service companies cannot wait for a project to come and then look for resources. You need to be resource ready. That is one of the things that these companies show to their clients when they bid for projects, or at least that is what I have heard of. It does make sense for me as a client when you show me that you have 100 people who are trained and ready to fulfill my company's service requirements. But all these service companies in my view never anticipated a slowdown like the one that we see, which is the reason why they are in this situation today.

I have an analogy for this. In your growing years, say you need a certain intake of carbohydrates and fats, the intake varying over the years, less at first and increasing as the years go by, for you to grow into a well nourished person. But if you start eating extra food at the age of 10 saying that anyway you will be requiring this extra diet at the age of 17, what is going to happen? You will turn into an unhealthy and obese person, your extra diet now a liability. That is exactly the situation these companies find themselves in today, looking for ways to shed the extra fat in their skins.

So far this post has been depressing. What is going to happen? Well, I am not worried by the slowdown and neither is Bill Gates. He said in the past week that conditions were very favorable for the technology industry to grow in the next decade. I agree with him completely. If you are excited about the Apple i-phone and the upcoming Microsoft Surface and how the world is going to be a different place in the years to come, you have to see the video on Morph, a concept by Nokia based on Nanotechnology.

But what about the Indian Techie? I know many people in the services industry who are plain and simply bored of their jobs. Many of them feel that their engineering and analytical skills have been wasted doing the job that they are doing, mostly writing emails and filling excel sheet status reports. What is going to happen when there are highly talented and amibituous people with experience in the industry but no path which satisfies them? Some, not all but some, of them are going to be the contributors to the technological development that Bill Gates has talked about. When the dot-com bubble burst in the 1999/2000 era there weren't many options in terms of Open-Source software which could be used in production level environments. But now you got so many flavors of Linux and Open Source databases like MySQL and PostGRESQL! Even Sun Microsystems now follows an open source model. In 1999/2000 you needed to pay for this stuff. Now its available for free making it a lot easier for anyone to get their company up and running. The environment exists today for people to concentrate and invest on their core competencies and deliver better products and services and not worry about investing valuable dollars just for software like Microsoft Office. I read an interview of the founder of Juniper Networks where he said that post the 1999-2001 slowdown you could hire a lot of talented people at very low salaries making it the best time for his company to expand. Is a similar time coming in again?

We have already seen this year the launch of products designed and developed in India. Tata Nano has created a buzz worldwide. (Even though I tried very hard, I can't remember when was the last time something like that happened!) Spice has designed a new mobile phone which will cost less than $20. Are we going to see similar innovative products in the field of software and technology? Well, only time will tell, but I have a hunch we could have something in the making here!

What is wrong with Google?

2008-03-15T00:19:00.003+05:30

The header certainly got your attention, didn't it? What can be wrong with Google? Almost for a decade now Google has been there for us, searching the internet and finding us what we want. Apart from search, Google has brought us services which are part of our daily lives now, services like Gmail, Orkut, YouTube, Blogger and Google News. I use most of these services and as I said earlier you would hardly ever get any disruptions in these services. So reliable is the Google brand that one of my friends said they dont need any error pages. Except Orkut of course, where we abuse the Orkut server for refusing us donuts!!

But in the past two weeks I feel things are starting to come apart. Firstly, with Google News there have been almost five instances when the service failed its service levels. These were disruptions that I myself experienced being an avid Google News visitor. Then the Gmail spam filter, has started detecting genuine mails as spam. The ironical thing was the mails sent to spam were from ZDnet and I have a filter in place to divert them from the inbox to archive folders under the label ZDnet. But i found my spam folder filled with six such messages today!!

Of course these are just minor errors, but given my nature to speculate and the fact that such disruptions and mistakes have happened in a very short span of time, I thought I write about it.

Just Like That - a PJ??

2008-03-14T14:15:00.001+05:30

An accomplished lawyer of the 60s era was visiting his grandson who was a developer. The lawyer was sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper while his grandson was on his laptop coding something.

Suddenly, the grandson sweared "*#@$&@#&$". Startled his grandfather said, "Son, whatever the matter, you shouldn't use words like those"

"Sorry about that grandpa! It's just that every time I run my program, OS shuts it down saying it has performed an illegal operation"

"Do you think it has performed any illegal operation?", asked the lawyer.

"I don't know. I don't think so!"

"Then ask that OS guy to prove that your program is illegal in court. I will take care of him."

Broken Laptop Screen

2008-03-14T00:24:00.004+05:30

I saw from some distance a colleague in office using his laptop keyboard and desktop monitor. Intrigued, I went up to him to see what he was really trying to do. Actually, somehow his laptop screen had broken down, so he had plugged in a desktop monitor to a laptop and was working.

I had never seen a broken screen like that. So I asked him to take a picture of it and send me. Well here they are!! The Broken laptop and the desktop images. Fascinating, wat say you??

Free ASP.NET Hosting!!

2008-03-11T23:57:00.003+05:30

I came across a site a month back or so which had free ASP.NET 2.0 hosting for 100 MB. WOW! I thought. I immediately registered to see what exactly were they offering. Upon my registration I was told that i could begin hosting only after 24 hours. I could not understand the reason they had given, something about many users registering and not using the service.

Well, I had completely forgotten about the whole thing. But today I was thinking of starting my own personal website. I knew that asp.net had a lot of sample starter kits with a personal site being one of them. I thought I might just download the starter kit and upload it to the free hosting service I had registered for. So I searched my mail as I had no clue where I had registered. Finally, I logged into the site and chose the appropriate things to get started. But nothing was appearing for the site manager, the place where the web-master can upload files etc. Stumped I noticed a few lines at the bottom which said that i had to contribute 5 answers or post a few genuine articles on asp.net to the community section of the site!!

Now, I appreciate the gesture that the people who have started the service are giving. But Please DO NOT call this FREE hosting. A day has just 24 hours. How a person utilizes his/her time decides how much he/she may earn. Wasting a valuable resource as your time and patience is a cost, though not in terms of dollars, but still it does get you peeved!

The UI for the forum and articles is so obsolete that you dont feel like staying on the site. And with all the Google ads over shadowing the main content of the site, I wonder what the real intentions of the service providers are. In my view, this could be a way to fool people to return to their site, increasing the number of hits and earning them revenue while the user is exasperated and exhausted by the harrowing experience.

I have surrendered and am not going to waste any more time trying for free hosting. This time around the w3schools punch line doesnt hold good - "The best things in life are free" If you have the patience you are free to try it out here.

All the best!!

Do you Flock?

2008-03-11T21:09:00.000+05:30

Are you a Web 2.0 Freak? Do you visit Flickr quite often? Can't get enough of facebook? If the answer to the above is yes then you have to try out Flock. What is Flock? Well if you are asking me that then surely you are not aware of the new sleek Web Browser based on Mozilla engine that has caught on with people. It is said to be a social browser.

I do not use facebook that often but just a trial run of the browser and you see that surfing with flock is a totally new experience. But let me not waste your time anymore. Go ahead! Download and try it out yourself! You can find the link on the side.

Or you can download it from here. Enjoy!!

In Theory & In Practise

2008-03-11T14:42:00.001+05:30

During my engineering studies, I had to undergo three weeks of Industrial Training. The purpose of this training was to gain insight on how the things that we were studying in college were actually being used in the Industry. The training had different meaning for different people. For some it was an opportunity to go to places they hadn't been to before, like my friends from Mechanical who spent their winter of 2004 in Haridwar visiting the BHEL facility, trying a hand at photography and God knows what. For some it meant to visit a friend's home, a friend who thanks to his/her contacts had arranged the Industrial Training for you. For some, it was a time to laze out at home as usual, getting the "Successfully Completed Training" certificate from the company without really going even one single day and then overjoyed on getting an "A" for three weeks of partying with friends. For me, it was about getting up early in Winter, catching a bus to visit facilities 40-50 miles from my home; braving the cold, the dust of coal and then the response of the clerk at the facility to somehow learn how the electrical equipments I had studied about were being applied in the Coal Mining Industry. I managed a "B" for the 1 credit that the training carried even though the lecturer who took my viva was convinced that I had actually been to those facilities and seen things in the report that I had written . (FYI: Many reports submitted were merely ones that people got from the companies imparting the training)

Anyway, for me the training was a learning experience. I realized that theoretical knowledge has to be supplemented by practical knowledge and vice versa. While the foreman who was telling me knew a hell lot about the the faults that occur and what they do to repair, he was unable to answer some questions. Reading my book back home I found out the answer to some of the questions I had. I realized that being an engineer you need both practical as well as theoretical knowledge.

I also learnt that getting things done is more about managing people than anything else. But the reason why I have talked about the training is to emphasize on theoretical as well as practical learning.

Now as the first phase of the web app I was building is nearing to a close, I was reminiscing on what have I learnt so far. I have gained confidence in understanding requirements and some level of confidence on how to code to get those requirements done. But most of my coding has involved Googling a particular problem and finding out a solution or trying out a few things. But after building a complete Web App I am still not confident of how much I know about Web Development using ASP.NET. Just the other day I was going through a ASP.NET book and realized that I have managed to learn how to do things. But not what was going on behind the scenes. I was just like the foreman knowing what to do, not knowing why we are doing it.

This approach will never allow me grow and be competitive. So I decided to refresh the concepts from the books once again. If you are not reading to understand the underlying concepts, change your approach or stagnate!!

Working on a Sunday - Why??

2008-03-09T16:26:00.001+05:30

Normally, I spend my Sundays reading The Sunday Times or sleeping or cooking ( that is a recent addition). But today I am in the office!! What the hell am I doing here? Well, I have been thinking for sometime to spend some extra time on the Web Application I am working on add some spice to it. Something which will earn me some bonus points. I have been thinking of this for the past 3-4 weeks now, but none of the weekends saw me coming to office. After a tiring 5 day week, there has to be some real motivation for you to get up and get going.
That motivation was not there the past few weeks.

So what has motivated me this weekend to get me up and running? Many might say that with the end of the year performance review going on, I want to score some bonus points. After all, most of us have very short memory. I would not say that the review is not in my mind. It is, indeed. But had that been such a motivating factor, I would have done quite a lot by now to really make a hot delicious curry out of my Web App. Alas! That is not the case.

There is another motivating factor, a force so strong that has pulled me out of my sleep and brought me to my office driving 14 kms in the sun. What is this force? Well, it is ASP.NET AJAX!!

On Friday, I AJAX enabled my web app and went through the sample website that is present along with the AJAX Toolkit. WoW! The things that AJAX can do. You see them everyday in new Web 2.0 sites and wonder how was this achieved. With ASP.NET AJAX, I got a glimpse of how I can achieve such functionality. So, on Friday I decided that I would definitely be spending some time this weekend to see how I can apply the spices of ASP.NET AJAX and make my web app curry that extra spicy and delicious.

So here I am at the office. While the demo videos I downloaded and saw seem to be very simple, I have been unable to use any Controls from the toolkit till now. They just dont seem to be working. Only the Update panel and Script Manager have been functioning perfectly, but none of the controls from the toolkit.

Whatever the case may be, ASP.NET AJAX is definitely the way forward. So expect a few posts on that in the coming weeks.

And yeah, Blogger on the Move really Rocks!!

Cheers!!

Blogger on the Move - Posting by Email

2008-03-07T00:44:00.001+05:30

Well, this has been on my mind for some time now. Posting by email!! There is nothing much to this post except for the fact that it is a test. However, as far as development is concerned I have been a bit off lately about posting anything. I have become pretty inactive on asp.net forum considering that I aggregated a 100 points within a fortnight.

The exciting bit is that I explored a bit of ASP.NET AJAX and I think I will be involved with it a lot more in the coming days. Lets see. Meanwhile hopefully with email posting enabled you will see a lot more posts now.

Till the next post!

Making the World a Better Place - The Microsoft Way

2008-03-04T01:53:00.000+05:30

In my previous post I had talked about Microsoft and how it has had to bow down to open source and change some of its strategies. So how does this impact you and me and the world in general? Some people may argue with the Microsoft way of doing things. As far as the Web is concerned I tend to agree with them. Google has outwitted Microsoft on the web by leaps and bounds. But come to the desktop and Windows is THE operating system used worldwide. Using Windows is so easy that anybody can learn it! That is why it is so popular. Another thing which I have liked about Microsoft is Visual Studio and the way they want developers to to develop applications. Many Java people would tend to disagree with that, but frankly speaking, I was tired of setting the environment and classpath and whatever you do to get a simple "Hello World" program to run.

Java is a beautiful language to learn. I have touched Java, and perhaps that is the reason why I like C#(which is a rip off from Java). But I never could end up programming in Java. Its not that I did not try, but I just wasnt able to acquaint myself with the IDE or the language. Probably, I needed some good company to learn Java.

Anyway, I find Microsoft tools easy and familiar to use. Many of the things in .NET framework are taken care of and you dont have to worry about them. Of course, you may curse Microsooft when you are stuck in a runtime exception and not knowing if the fault is in your code or Microsoft generated code!

But the crux of the matter is, for guys like me who are beginning web development, if you dont keep things simple, we would end up studying finance!!When you have an idea which can change the way the world is today, implementing that idea should be as easy and simple as possible. I believe Microsoft does this and hence enables hundreds of dreamers like me to pursue and try ideas which may destroy the world! Just imagine right at this moment, a hundred people are thinking/working on an idea which may change the world, fine tuning the idea and not worrying about how to do it.

These ideas may make the World a better place - and Microsoft IMO is helping them immensely.

Microsoft vs Open Source - Strike 2!!

2008-03-04T01:11:00.000+05:30

I wasn't really aware about the open source hoopla till my first year in college when thanks to my dear friends Shashank Shekhar and Darshan Santani, I heard about Linux. It was the first time that I had heard of an operating system other than Windows. Well, I have come a long way since then. I even gave a seminar on Linux to educate and spread awareness amongst my classmates about the Open Source and Free Software Movement. Though I tried at times to learn Linux I never really could get over using Windows.

Anyway, I have always liked people who love Linux. They remind you of the Freedom Fighters of India, fighting for Independence through non-violent means; the 60's and 70's generation of US fighting for world peace and an end to the Vietnam War through Rock Music. Those kind of people in this decade and the previous ones have been fighting against the Microsoft View of software. It has been a long and hard battle between the 2, but clearly we see a strong movement in Open Source and Free Software which has gained momentum which has sent alarm bells ringing in Redmond. Read this and you will know how the movement has forced Microsoft to change its viewpoint.

You must be wondering why I called this post as Strike 2!! Well, in my previous post I had mentioned how the Express Editions of Microsoft tools were really a response to the growing popularity of Open Source and Free Software Development packages. That in my view was Strike 1 for Microsoft! Recently, Microsoft announced that it is going to provide students with its Professional Development tools for free. Also, it is going to share details of some of its technology with open source developers. This for me has been Strike 2!

I am not a Microsoft hater like some people. I just tend to disagree with some of their moves at times. I am just happy that more people will be able to contribute to innovation using Microsoft tools!

Passing Values between Web Pages (Beginner)

2008-02-24T03:07:00.000+05:30

During a coffee break at work, I was explaining my friend how I had used a Wizard control in my Web App for the User registration process and had saved myself from headaches involving passing data between pages, storing user selection of choices in each page etc. My friend was pretty impressed with what the Wizard control could achieve and commended Scott & his team at Redmond for making things simple for programmers. "Developing Web Apps is pretty challenging compared to a Windows Application. And that is the sex appeal of developing Web Apps.."

True!! I started to wonder about the difference in approach between a Web App and a Windows Application. In case of a windows application passing data between 2 forms is a piece of cake. But how do I pass values between web pages? I was sure that it wasn't something very complex, but I realized that it was something I did not know. So I decided to try that and did so in a matter of minutes. Thanks to the documentation and example at msdn! This is what I did.

1. I created a new website with 2 pages Default.aspx and Default2.aspx

2. In Default.aspx I added a Textbox and a button.

3. In Default2.aspx I added a Label. My Objective was to display text entered in the text box in the label on click of the button.

4. I set the PostbackUrl of button to Default2.aspx

ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" PostBackUrl="~/Default2.aspx"

5. Next I write the following code in the page load of Default2.aspx

if (Page.PreviousPage != null)
{
TextBox SourceTextBox = (TextBox)Page.PreviousPage.FindControl("TextBox1");

if (SourceTextBox != null)
{
Label1.Text = SourceTextBox.Text;
}
}

6. And that's it! The value of the text box is passed onto the Label on the second page.

This is one of the many ways of passing data between pages. I will explore and post about them in the coming weeks.

Till Then Happy Programming !!

Techsassy Now also available at Wordpress!!

2008-02-19T22:22:00.000+05:30

In my last post, I said that I would be posting a few tips over the weekend. But 3 weekends have passed since my last post and nothing has come!! Well the weekends after my last post have been involved in learning new things about ASP.NET, catching up with my cousins and whats been happening back home. And yeah on one of the weekends there was a power surge which resulted in my UPS blasting and smoking off. I have given it for repair and hope it will be functional by next weekend. Also we have been facing a few electrical problems( meaning no electricity ) since last week which was fixed just today. So I guess you pretty much get the idea WHY there have been no posts for quite some time.

Anyway, for the past three weeks I have been trying to build a sort of registration page using the WIZARD control of ASP.NET 2.0. This has been quite challenging. I am on the verge of finishing it off ( hopefully I will do that by tomorrow). I will then be posting an article on CodeProject about how I used the wizard control to achieve my objectives. Of course, you will find that here as well.

Over the past few weeks, I have also started using the asp.net forums to post queries and answer whatever I can. Using the forums, I definitely feel a part of the ASP.NET developer community. The community is very active and I got replies to my queries within the hour.

Which reminds of one of the headlines in tech news for today. Microsoft, is about announce a program wherein it is going to give software like Visual Studio Professional Edition, Windows Server, SQL Server Developer etc. to student across eight countries for free.More about that here Definitely this is good news but India is not in that list. This to me is a defining moment. This is what Open Source and Free Software have done.

And before I end, I have made a copy of this blog at wordpress. It is http://techsassy.wordpress.com. Why wordpress? Till not it is now completely blocked at my office. Dont know what is the company achieving by blocking blogger and other blogs.

Anyway, hopefully my next post will be helpful for developers and should be up soon. Till then, Happy Programming!!

What A Rough Day!!

2008-01-29T22:48:00.000+05:30

That was yesterday!! It was a very bad one in terms of productivity. We literally spent the whole day trying to access one instance of SQL Server from other system on the network. But in vain. Microsoft does provide a Knowledge Article on what changes to make to enable remote access but even after that we were left high and dry!

My aim was to understand how data flows in a 3-Tier architecture. But without database connectivity, building the DAL itself was impossible. In the end we decided to proceed with local databases instead of Remote access and try and meet some of the fast approaching deadlines.

Today, was a fruitful one! Referring to msdn and my MCTS prep book I was trying to build one small module and that too with the proper architecture. Some of my team-mates were initially averse in building separate layers for Business Logic and Data Access but I pressed and convinced them. For the time being at least.

The best part was after a days work, of the three Unit Test Cases I had written for this module, I was successful in 2 of them at the first shot. And the third case which failed was debugged in no time, thanks to the proper segregation of business logic and data access from the presentation.

The coming days are going to be more exciting as I hope to learn more about Disconnected classes for data access in ADO.NET. Will surely post a few useful tips around the weekend!! Hopefully!

Till then, Happy Programming!

Happy New Year!!

2008-01-29T02:34:00.000+05:30

Wishing all a Very Happy New Year!! Though we are already a month into it!!

Well, its been quite a while since I posted anything here. DO NOT think that my inactivity at this blog means that nothing is happening at the tech front! In fact, a lot has been happening and I really haven't had the time to write things down. Also, the buggers at my company have now blocked all access to blogger. Forget about posting, I can't even visit this blog anymore from my company to refer to some links and ideas that I had posted here!!

Anyway, this week we have kicked off with development for our project so a lot of exciting times lie ahead. Lots of things to learn and share with you all :). Also I hope to kick off development of my own trial project in 3 weeks time or so. Lets see where that ends up. I seem to have lost all motivation to work on that idea anymore. i also got a new idea which seems to be fairly simple but attractive. I just hope that it doesn't end up being another Wild Goose Chase!

Expect some useful posts soon....till then ...... Happy Programming!!

Changing CSS having no effect!

2007-12-19T23:24:00.000+05:30

In the week just gone by, I received a web app from one of my colleagues who was on medical leave. This was supposed to be a prototype of what I will be developing in the days to come. However, there were many issues with the UI of the site. The color scheme though looked good did not match with the logo of the company and had to be changed.

It took me some time to realize that the CSS file being used was one within the App_Themes folder and not the one outside. I had been making changes to the wrong file, hence the changes I was making were not reflecting. But hang on!! Now I was making changes to the correct file but still I could not see the changes reflecting in the front end. I double checked and was stumped. Just moments ago the changes made to the CSS were reflecting in the UI. What could be the possible reason now?

Somehow I had the feeling that I should refresh the page once(probably because of my experience with Service Desk Customization) and Bingo!!

Now I again I made some changes mainly changing the logo, but again it wasn't reflecting. I refreshed. Nothing!! Now what could be the reason? Thankfully I had a backup of the original CSS file. I compared that with the modified one. I realized what was happening. To work faster I was using the build style option in Visual Web Developer. When you use this a Window opens where you can visually set the CSS properties. I was using this to set the background image to the one I had created. The location of this image was "App_Themes/Theme1/Images/Image1.gif". So what was happening was the in the CSS the same url for the image was getting stored. But as my CSS file was already located at "App_Themes/Theme1/" the correct url for the image should have been "/Images/Image1.gif". I changed the Url and Voila!!

As I had posted earlier, Microsoft is always trying to simplify things by allowing you to code Visually. But this Visual coding style has pitfalls and is a sure source of many bugs in applications. My advice to all is "Be Extra Careful when writing code Visually!"

Cheers!!

About Gathering & Understanding Requirements, and AGILE Development Model

2007-12-13T19:08:00.000+05:30

All Software Engineering text books talk about how important it is for a Software Team to understand the requirements that their software will fulfill. So a person who is gathering requirements from the stakeholders needs to really understand what is desired. Requirements gathering is THE most important stage in the SDLC. Yeah, even I was aware that!

But again textual knowledge and practical knowledge are 2 different cups of tea(or coffee if you're an American reader :P ) I never really understood its importance until I myself was developing software. (okay I was customizing something already built, but then again I was developing features to meet the requirements from a certain POV..) My development was basically to do what I was told to do. Never really thought about the requirements!! But when whatever I was told to do wasn't impressing the stakeholders, I was puzzled. My senior used to tell me the requirement and then tell me what should I do to achieve it. But since this wasn't resulting in something which was desired, I was intrigued. The problem wasn't that I was being communicated incorrect information. Rather I would say it was incomplete information. From the point of view of the functionality required I was told only a part. But later as i discovered, what I was being asked to develop was something that would integrate 2 business process to make one complete process. Also whatever solutions were being suggested by my senior would provide the User with functionality that the Business Process demanded but unfortunately, not what the User demanded. Whatever was being developed initially would never be accepted!

The problem here is that nowadays people define the process flow and the requirements based on that(at least whatever I have come across...I am sure things are not so bad in other companies..) But a very important factor is to understand who are the people who will use the software and what could be the features that they want. Unfortunately even in the age of Orkut, companies are failing to recognize the fact that a person who is exposed to easy to use web applications like Orkut will hardly like to use a web-app with a boring interface like Service Desk. They will use it not because they like it but because they have to. And this in my view is a factor that decreases productivity and which will drive Enterprise Applications in the coming years.

Another important aspect is if the Users are aware of whether the requirements they want is something which they will use. Most of the times that may not be the case and the person gathering requirements should question the user at each and every stage of the requirement gathering. A very good example is what I encountered today. The Web App I will be developing in the coming days has a forum feature where anybody can post questions. However only people who are considered SME's in that particular area will be allowed to answer the question!! First of all, why shouldn't I, not being an SME, be allowed to answer. I may know things that the SME might not or I may be able to provide an answer quickly as the SME(s) might be busy with some issues in the production systems. Secondly if the SME is my dear colleague who sits right next to me would I post on a forum or ask directly to him. The forum thing will work if your organization has a large volume of employees. But in this case, I have a hunch that we are building software which will never be used.

Anyway, whatever the case maybe, what I am learning is programming in C# and ASP.NET and hence I am satisfied! Also the AGILE model of development is followed so should be interesting!

More about agile development some other time!! Till then.... Happy Programming!!

Web Basics

2007-12-08T23:19:00.000+05:30

My preparation for the Application Development Foundation Exam of MCTS hasn't been going very well. Mostly because it contains a lot of things which are new to me and I will take some time to understand. However this morning I was just having a look at Web Client Development Exam, and read the first chapter. This was mainly because the contents of the first chapter were interesting and more aligned with what I am doing or will be doing now onwards. Here is just a brief of what I read, and is being posted more as a ready reference for me than anything.

The first thing that is talked about the Web Server and how it has changed from being a simple server returning data(response) to requests by the web browser without any state, to being a complex contraption managing state between web pages, accepting data and responding to it. Also, the growing importance of web browsers with Client Side scripting technologies like AJAX creating new ways of addressing things.

Mostly, it is an introduction about the HTTP or the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.(I was once dumb enough to think that whatever acronym ended with a P had to be some protocol. Though FTP, HTTP, SMTP, SNMP etc. are all protocols this doesn't necessarily hold true for everything. In an interview once I was asked about OLAP. I was definite that I had heard about it somewhere but answered in the negative. Once outside I was discussing with a friend as to what could OLAP be and came up with Object Layer Access Protocol!! For the uninitiated it is On-Line Analytical Processing.)

It talks about the various HTTP methods like GET, POST, HEAD etc. and also something about Distributed authoring and Versioning or DAV, something built on top of HTTP 1.1 which enables easier web development in a team scenario. I also got to know about the standard codes in HTTP. Remember the 404 Page not Found Error!!

Basically there are 5 Status-Code Groups

1xx
2XX
3XX
4XX when there is error on the browser
5XX When there is an error on the server

HTTP uses MIME types and you should know some of the common MIME types. You also learn a bit about how data is posted back to server, HTTP GET and POST and finally about POST BACK and HTTP debugging!

I am finding this interesting! Might just post some more cool stuff to know about the web!

The New VWD 2008 Express

2007-12-08T22:09:00.000+05:30

I wasn't aware that its already out! Yes, Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions were available for download from Monday, 19 Nov, 2007 says the news channel on my newly installed Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Yeah I installed it last night! Still exploring and will post what I like about it, but in the meantime you can check out Scott Mitchell's review on 4guysfromrolla.

To Install Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, go here

A Little About Databases

2007-12-05T20:39:00.000+05:30

One of the huge disadvantages of using Microsoft Products I find is that you tend to do things improperly! Let me share with you something I learnt today.

I have installed the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as the default database to use with Visual Studio for my projects. Working in an Enterprise Software Services Firm I am aware that you have special roles for a database administrator. The DBA will never share the system admin or db admin login credentials with you. For your application to access the database in a safe manner a new user is generally created for you to use! At least in my limited experience that is what I have come to know!

So for my demo project I decided to create a new user and not use the sa login. I named this user dba. When deciding on what would be the default schema of this user I decided on db_owner to avoid any access issues later on. ( My database knowledge is limited to RDBMS concepts, writing Queries, Sp etc. I have never undergone any training or ventured on my own into what one would call the DBA's domain). Using this user I created the tables required for my application. The tables created appear as db_owner.assets.

Now I am using the same user to connect from my app to db. I had no issues in visually building the Connection String which I promptly stored in my web.config file. I had no issues in building TableAdapters with simple SELECT statements as well. However, no I decided to graduate to the next level and create my own Stored Procedures. I try to do this Visually once again but I get a failure message saying the schema dba does not exist or does not have sufficient permissions. OOPS!!

How is that possible? I made dba the db_owner. I check and surely dba still is db_owner. I wonder what could be wrong. Maybe I should try and create the stored procedure from Management Studio Express instead of Visual Studio. Fails again with the same message!

I examine the stored procedure to find "CREATE PROCEDURE dba.assets AS ...". Oh! the schema. When dba created the tables they where created as db_owner.assets. So I expanded the nodes in the Management Studio Express and went to schemas to find that indeed no schema named dba existed. So I created a schema named dba as I saw fit and then tried creating the stored procedure. Voila!

Microsoft assumes a lot of things when it Visually creates anything for you. It sure makes things a lot simple and easy to use but can lead to simple errors like this. If only such an error were to creep up in a production environment!!In this case Microsoft should have taken care that the default schema for dba was db_owner.But that is what software is all about I guess; finding new improvements from time to time.

Value & Reference Types in C#

2007-11-30T20:09:00.000+05:30

Sometime in Ocotber when I had started to brush up my concepts about C#, there was a serious doubt in my mind. I was confused as to how were arguments passed in C# and what exactly were value and reference types.

Recently I read an article which is the best I have read so far on this topic. Haven't found anything like that in books also. So if you are confused or just want to revise on the concepts, read this article.

This was really helpful in understanding the concepts which are very important for Certification. I might post some points to remember but you know ... posting also consumes quite a lot of time....!!

FYI-ASP.NET Resources

2007-11-29T23:28:00.000+05:30

Since I was back from vacation I have been trying to build a momentum in my learnings of C#. The internet is as good a source as any but still I have a habit of buying books, even though I may not finish reading it.Recently , I was just at Crossword and stumbled upon the C# Black Book. Ever since I got into programming i have found a Black book at my side always handy. It doesn't necessarily give you the complete concept but the practical examples and real code that you get in the book can serve as a good source for reference. And yeah, without thinking much, I bought it.

I was trying to build a simple web app for inventory management. For this I was using the new membership controls that Microsoft have provided you in ASP.NET 2.0. A very good resource to understand this new feature and indeed almost anything regarding ASP.NET is the site 4guysfromrolla. "When you think ASP, think 4guysfromrolla.com" No doubts about that! I am already fan of Scott Mitchell,founder of the site. Go through his articles on membership and you will understand why. He has also written a lot of articles on a whole range of features which I am sure will be very useful. After going through his article, I was able to merge the database schema for membership with my own schema of course resolving issues with help from msdn forums.

He has also written about how to build a 3-tier application on msdn. This was something I had been looking for a while and was ecstatic when I read the article. You can read that here.

A lot of things happening at the professional front as well. Hopefully things will sort out for the good.

The Break

2007-11-20T23:54:00.000+05:30

I was on vacation for quite some time now. But good news is I am back and hopefully rejuvenated to get alive and kicking once again! Gotta buck up! Come on!!

About Certifications and More....

2007-10-18T19:01:00.000+05:30

Without wasting any time I have begun work on C# and how I can add value to myself. Industry recognized certifications is the way ahead! In case you are unaware about certifications, they are proof of your competence. You may be knowing Java but is there a standard way to test your profiency in the language? Yes there is! Sun Microsystems will test you (for a price of course!) and if you pass the test you will get a certificate from Sun saying that you are a Sun Certified Java Programmer or SCJP as it is popularly known. The test is not a cakewalk by any means, though you wouldnt call it very tough as well. Like any other exam, planned preparation will see you through. Many of my friends have cleared it and some with exceptional scores. And like Sun Microsystems there are a whole range of Companies that provide you with options to get certified in their products. Certifications add value to your resume. Of course there is a lot of difference between certification knowledge and working knowledge. However, a combination of both will really make you the expert in that field. That is why many of the certifications in their "Who should appear for the test?" FAQ tell that the ideal candidate would have worked on the technology for about year or so. However many of us in India take the test even though we have no working knowledge of the particular technology/product. I guess we have been brought up like that.

So much do you have to shell out to appear for the exam? Well that varies from exam to exam but the simple programming ones cost you around $50-100. That is about INR 2000-4000. Not too expensive I would say given the salaries that people are getting these days in the IT sector in India. And if you are already working for a company chances are that your company will refund the amount back to you. So that's pretty cool!

Thomson Prometric is the most popular vendor offering tests in various certifications across the globe.

So while I am still in the learning phase of C# and the .NET framework, I will also start preparing for the certifications. That is because if I got to have the edge in the market I must get certified. In the course of the next few posts I will be posting articles about things you should know about C# and the .NET framework that might help you in the certification exam. My first target is to clear the 70-536 Application Development Foundation and then the 70-528 Web Client Development after which I would be a MCTS in Web Application Development. Lets see how this turns out! Godspeed!

To know more about Microsoft Certifications, please go here.
To know more about Sun Certifications, please go here.

The Answer

2007-10-17T22:09:00.000+05:30

In my previous post I had written about the dilemma I was facing. Well it seems that the dilemma is no more! And the answer is I will be using ASP.NET and Microsoft tools for developing whatever I develop henceforth.

So how did I arrive at such a decision? Firstly, if you have read my previous post, I do have a soft corner for Microsoft Software and Technologies. This is because I have used them before and find it easy to pick up.

Secondly, my work in the new role will revolve around .NET. Hence, the obvious choice seems to be .NET. Through this week I realized that developing a full-blown web-app in any language/technology/platform/framework involves in-depth knowledge. And as I have to work on .NET I might as well use it.

So the decision has been made. Its going to be C# and ASP.NET 2.0 all the way for the next few months.

Also Mr. Bob Tabor's videos I downloaded from msdn tilted the balance towards .NET and Visual Studio. For more about that visit MSDN Beginner Developer

In the posts to follow this, I will post about things that I learn about .NET, probably about how to get certified and other useful things as well.

The Dilemma

2007-10-10T20:44:00.000+05:30

I am facing a dilemma that many of you would have already faced or will face in the near future. I was planning to get into Web Development completely and had a nice idea for a simple web app. But as I am a beginner I am unaware of the various frameworks/languages/techniques/design patterns using which a robust web application can be made.

My good friend Darshan Santani sent a presentation which compared various options. PHP/Ruby on Rails/Java using Struts/JSF, ASP.NET etc. Each option had its pros and cons and at the end, the presenter had made a very simple conclusion:"The option with which you are at ease is the most suitable."

Having done my final sem project on VB, I am very much used to Visual Studio as an IDE. Though I have explored NetBeans and Eclipse, the ease I find in using Visual Studio is not there. You could say that I am a prisoner of Microsoft Software which has handicapped me in using only Microsoft software. With Microsoft coming out with Express editions of its tools and other software being used by developers like Visual Studio and SQL Server Express editions which are available for free, rookies like me who are used to the Microsoft way of software development can now use the these express editions at no cost. It is as good as Open Source IDE's for Java like Eclipse or NetBeans. So now that I have the express editions to pursue my interests why should I opt for Java? The answer lies in the fact that whatever Microsoft is providing you is only just sufficient for you to learn stuff.

But if you want to do some serious stuff then you will have to shell out a pocketful to get the appropriate software from Microsoft. Impressive strategy I must say! So though I am not into anything really serious at this moment, If I build my competency in .NET then I would have to probably shellout $1000 for just a Windows Server Operating System. Compare that with Ubuntu Server Edition which is FREE and probably is much more secure. But learning Java at this stage means to invest the one resource I am short of - TIME!!

So you are aware of the dilemma now! Any suggestions will be helpful as to what I should do- but at the moment it looks like .NET to me.

Hello World!

2007-10-08T16:43:00.000+05:30

The first example that any book on any programming language will give you is that of a program to print "Hello World".

So I have titled this post as Hello World, wishing all you readers a big hello. Welcome to my blog on the technology that I am learning which I want to share with all you people out there.

I am working as a Sofware Engineer in a Software Services Firm catering to the parent company which is a Retail giant in the world. Apart from the work that I do I am generally interested in technology, specially the Internet. Hence I thought it was high time that I started sharing whatever I learn with the world out there. I have greatly benefitted from the numerous blogs and posts by various people and I hope that whatever I post here will be beneficial for someone. I have a busy schedule and might find it difficult to post regularly but I will try my best and hope that this blog does not turn out to be one that is deleted.

People interested in contributing to this blog are invited. Please send me a mail at singh[dot]shashishekhar[at]gmail[dot]com if you are interested in forming a blogging team.

Cheers!!