What have I been upto?

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

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.