Just About Anything...

A CWG lane, but why not a carpool lane in Delhi ?

2010-09-12T19:01:00.002+05:30

As the Common Wealth Games of 2010 drew closer, the Delhi government realized that looking at how the peak hour traffic is on the Delhi roads, the athletes probably will never reach the venues. Hence they decided to earmark one lane as the CWG lane, exclusively for the CWG vehicles to pass through smoothly.

The NH8 expressway is choc a bloc of traffic during weekdays with people driving their cars bumper to bumper for over an hour. Below pic shows how bad the scene is at the NH8 toll gate which can take you over half an hour to cross at 9 am.

My suggestion is why not convert the CWG lane on NH8 for instance to a car pool lane. In the above pic, 95% of the cars would have only one occupant who is driving to work all by himself. A direct result of subsidies on cars in Delhi region and people wanting to show off their 4 wheelers on Delhi roads. The traffic havoc is a direct result of this.

By converting the CWG lane to a carpool lane, we can encourage citizens to carpool to work. People can easily find neighbors travelling to the same location of work using websites like these. The carpool lane is strictly reserved for cars with more than a single occupant. Since the fine system is already in place, there would be nothing more which needs to be done. Looking at the brighter side of CWG, one might have a solution for the traffic nightmare in Delhi !

3 simple but addictive games for Nexus One

2010-03-22T00:03:00.002+05:30

I bet you will get addicted to these games on Android, especially on the cool Nexus One screen.

Nice to have these for time pass !

Just Books, Bangalore is a promising startup running crappy software

2009-11-28T22:42:00.002+05:30

JustBooks is a Book Rental startup incubated by IIMB. They have a fairly decent pricing model where u can take 2 books at a time for 150/= a month in the basic plan.

Since the book store is conveniently located at 12th Main, Indiranagar, I promptly went there to get a membership. The store is kept quite neatly and boasts of touch screen kiosks to search books under an air conditioned roof, with a good collection of books and comics on the shelves.

The sad part though, is that when I asked the lady at the counter to add me as a member, she struggled. She had taken the money from me, but the software she was using could not do the basic user scenario of "Add a new member" and it crashed. I was feeling more embarrassed thinking about the state of the software they were using, and for a startup out of an Indian IT Hub B-School. A small glance at their website shows how pathetic it is. I think people made better library applications as a part of their college projects.

I sometimes wonder what this indicates ? Does this show how serious we are about building software for an Indian Business ? Maybe customers in India are not really that demanding when it comes to the software they use ?

What I am sure of, is that someone tried to source really cheap labor to do a shoddy job.

Why auto drivers offer the worst customer service ?

2009-09-28T08:59:00.004+05:30

Imagine you hail an auto to go a remote residential place from a city hub at 9pm after doing your shopping. The auto driver stops promptly, allows you to get in, and without a word turns the meter on, after asking where you wanted to go. After a smooth ride, you even tell him to get into the small gali which leads to your house. Once you reach your doorstep, the auto driver looks at the meter and calls out the fare. You pay him putting on a thankful smile on your face, as he takes it and drives away.

What is the probability of this happening ? Well.. maybe 5% ! But why do the 95% auto drivers behave this way ? Why do they not offer a good customer service ? Because driving an auto is not a business where you can retain customers. Cmon when have you boarded the same auto which you took last week to go the mall. Even if you did , you wont remember. And that is why an auto driver has no incentive in making a good impression while he is dropping you home. Instead he tries to extract the most out of you by charging a fare over and above the meter, dropping you way before your house and leaving after cursing you. Cos he doesn't care, you are never gonna show up again !

RedBus.in has God Tech Support

2009-09-10T21:45:00.003+05:30

My friend Gavri was trying to book a bus ticket from Bangalore to Pondicherry online via www.redbus.in . I was sitting behind , watching him work his way through the site until we came to a page where we had to enter a phone number. Gavri, after a bit of reluctance, finally entered his cellphone number. At the last very step, where we hit "continue" after entering the credit card details, something bad happened and the website brought us back to an empty credit card details page. Well.. we figured that the transaction had failed.

Clearly annoyed with this, as my friend tried to move away from the computer, his cellphone buzzed with someone from Redbus asking "Hey.. you wanted a ticket from B'lore to Pondicherry, and your transaction failed online rite ??? " . All this happened within 60 seconds of the transaction failure and we were completely surprised by this miraculous customer support call !.

Even though the online application has a long way to go... this nearly God like customer support will surely save a lot of customers from walking away from RedBus.in. They definitely retained one customer right in front of me !

Dil Chahta Hai to Rock On - Bidding farewell to an era

2008-10-20T21:54:00.005+05:30

A few of my old college friends decide to call for a get together this Sunday. And since I was not doing much over the weekend, I readily agreed.We met up in the evening somewhere near Jayanagar, and decided to have dinner at a small resort off Kanakpura Rd called Holiday Village.

We all passed out of college in 2002, and it had been almost 6 years since I had met a few of them. So it was amazing to find out what each of us was upto. One of my friends had already completed his MS, a few others well settled in IT companies, one of them married, and some more on the verge of getting married. There were also cool new cars and bikes possessed by people who once hung from the foot boards of BTS buses to reach college early morning ;-) .

The food was decent and we played a bit of pool and carrom which added to our fun evening. Coincidentally, I saw the movie Rock On a few days back, which reminded me not only about the favourite college movie of our times, Dil Chahta Hai, but also all the magic moments in our college life. The get together cheerfully reasserted the fact, just like both of the Farhan Akhtars movies, our lives have also moved to a new phase, a phase which probably is a beginning of a new era !

"Meri laundry ka ek bill, ek aadhi padhi novel ....
Ek ladki ka phone number.... mere kaam ka ek paper....

...... kabhi khud pe hansa main.. aur kabhi khud pe roya.. ! "

Mission Kashmir - Srinagar (Day 7)

2008-05-22T09:05:00.001+05:30

The last day in Srinagar we decided to see what the city had to offer to the shoppers. And I must say it was quite a lot which made even reluctant shoppers like us actually buy things. There were lot of useful articles made from Walnut wood and Paper mache, the usual Kashmiri silk sarees and Pashmina shawls, varieties of wool, kashmiri kesar, dry fruits, etc...

We made a quick round of the Lal chowk area and Polo view. Gogo bought a Pashmina shawl for over 8000/= after a lot of double checking from Irfan's folks on the quality of pashmina. I must say it was a good buy. We also bought some kesar (Saffron), a few minitaure shikaras made of walnut wood, and some othe random wooden articles. We wennt back to the guest house after having lunch at a local pizza outlet. At the guest house we played cricket again with our new cool bat for a while. We ended the day by watching some television, and thinking we needed to pack our bags for our flight back home the next day.

Mission Kashmir - Pahalgam (Day 6)

2008-05-22T08:50:00.004+05:30

It felt a bit dull with 2 of our friends leaving for Leh. Undeterred by that, we decided that the remaining 3 of us will head towards Pahalgam, a hill station south of Srinagar. We headed south of Srinagar on the Jammu highway in our usual Qualis. We stopped in between to look at some ruins of Avantipura which were on the way. The ruins were of some ancient temples.

Going further ahead on the highway we spotted a lot of shops selling cricket bats. The bats were made of wood cut from trees around that very area. Gogo, Irfan and me tried out some strokes on the variety of bats available in one of the shops, and decided to buy one ultimately. We got a decent bat for an amazingly low price of 200/= .

On the way to Pahalgam we decided to do white water rafting on a tributary of the Jhelum river. It was one of the popular attractions among people of all ages there. The experience was really out of the world for someone like me who was doing it for the first time. I was pretty nervous sitting on the bumpy raft initially but then got used to it somewhat to complete a 2km ride. Gogo even did it once again on our return drive from Pahalgam.

We reached Pahalgam just before lunch. We were so hungry that we directly headed out to one of the famous eat out's there called "Nathu's Rasoi". After helping ourselves to some good Chole Bhaturey and Aloo Pooris we started to explore this small hill station. Pahalgam is the place were most people start their Amarnath Yatra, so there was a lot of information about the Yatra all over the place. We ended up mostly wandering around the lush green meadows, some small parks and clicking patel shots. Ah, from patel shots I remember entering a coffee shop called "Cafe Login" in Pahalgam, where there was a huge Gujju family of 20 people already keeping the barista boys busy ordering pizzas and vada paavs ! ( in a coffee shop ! ). We managed to get a small table by the corner there, sipped our coffee while watching the Great Gujju Family eat the hell out of the place.

We headed back to Srinagar towards the evening after exploring Pahalgam and helped ourselves to some light dinner for the night. The next day was all about shopping in Srinagar so we needed some rest.

Mission Kashmir - Sonamarg (Day 4 & 5)

2008-05-22T08:14:00.004+05:30

We decided to start the day late since we were planning a stay in Sonamarg over night. We left Srinagar at around 10 am in our usual vehicle. The drive was quite pleasant and we reached Sonamarg just around lunch time. We checked in into the first hotel we could spot near the mountains and it turned out to be pretty good. Irfan somehow managed to bargain the rent to half of what was quoted using his Kashmiri lingo. After finishing lunch at a nearby restaurant, we headed out towards the famous glacier. This was by default since everyone there was gung ho about it.

There was an option to hire horses/ponies to take us there, but we ditched that and decided to walk. The walk turned out to be really pleasant along the meadows. We were warned by some of the horsemen on the way that the glacier is way to far, there is a cold water stream flowing across, and there is no reason we should be walking all the way. But as usual we decided against all that. Gabbar and Ranjan were pretty pleased with the sceneries offered to their DSLRs. Infact we had taken a lot of pictures on the way, including a place by the river Sindh, where some of us actually got into the water for fun.

The walk took almost an hour and when we thought we almost reached the glacier we saw a wide stream flowing right across. People on horses were easily going across with the poor animal bearing most of the chill. We spotted a tree trunk being used as a bridge by some people to cross. I must say it took quite some courage to actually use the trunk to cross, since it was partly broken towards the end.

It was quite cold when we reached the glacier. We decided to have a cup of tea from the nearby tea stall before we started walking on the snow. For some reason Akshay introduced us to a few guys who operated wooden sledges on the glacier. He somehow made friends with them even before all of us reached the point. His intention was to go to the possible highest point on the glacier and come down on the sledge. Before the others could realize Akshay had left with a sledge guy towards the top. By then all of us finished our cups of tea and started walking on the snow. I grabbed a pair of boots for myself since my sport shoes were not really up for the wet snow. Some sledge guys followed us eagerly even after we told them that we were in no mood for sledging ;-) . Gabbar even ran away from them literally on the snow capped hill. Ultimately after a lot of eprsuation, the sledge guys managed to convince Ranjan, Irfan and me to ride. They gave up on Gabbar eventually. I sat behind the sledgeman on the wooden sledge and the guy took off. In front of me I saw Irfan's sledge going smoothly until it toppled on the snow just near a place where there was thin ice. Irfan almost broke his nose and struggled to get back up on the ice. For obvious reasons he ditched the sledgeman and descended from the ice on foot. I managed a turbulent but decent ride back down and so did Ranjan. Gabbar came down walking and we started waiting for Akshay.

We got a bit worried since it was getting dark and cloudy and we had a 3km walk back to the hotel. Akshay was nowhere in sight, and even the guys who traded his shoes for snow boots had given up on him. We tried to ask around everywhere but no one had any clue about him. After a tense half an hour wait, with some nervous cups of tea being gulped, we found Akshay coming back , totally excited about his sledge ride back. All of us were furious at him for making us wait for so long. We were now almost at risk of being caught in the middle of a snow or rain fall ( Well.. whatever will fall eventually from the dark sky! ) since we were quite tired, we decided to take the ride back on horses thinking they would be faster. Although Gabbar and Akshay decided to take a walk back. The 3 of us on horses realised pretty soon that it would have been faster if we had walked back. But it was quite late now, and the snowfall started right in the middle of a cliff on the way back. Drenched we somehow made it to the nearby taxi stand, from where we got a taxi back to the hotel. The taxi was quite a saviour and we reached the hotel which was nice, warm and cozy. Akshay and Gabbar managed to run back quite successfully, with Akshay toppling head over heels once. That being the only hiccup for them but all of us were unhurt. We ended the day with some decent dinner and a good game of cards.

The next day in Sonamarg was quite lazy. We had no plan in particular so we headed out to the nearby village where we found a decent place for breakfast. We were the only ones out there, and the restaurant owner was quite excited. We orderd for some bread omlettes and aloo paranthas which went quite wlel with our morning cups of tea. Gabbar enquired about buses to Leh from there, and we got to know that they would have to stay overnight in Kargil and can reach Leh the next day. Akshay decided to go with Gabbar and so only the 3 of us headed our way back to Srinagar. We had lunch at Mughal Darbar in Srinagar which was really good. Ended the day with some local shopping and planning for the next day.

Mission Kashmir - Gulmarg (Day 3)

2008-05-21T09:13:00.003+05:30

It was decided the previous day that we would go to Gulmarg next. And so, after a lazy breakfast at the guest house we boarded our Qualis. The driver was kinda unhappy that we caled him at 8am and we had not even woken up by then ;-) . Irfan called in sick and could not join us for the day.

We started our 2 hour journey at around 10am ultimately. The ride through the srinagar roads was pretty good and once we hit the highway it just got smoother. All the way towards gulmarg , we could see the snow capped mountains and the lush green meadows. It was almost like the mountains were eager to welcome us. The only hiccup in the drive was a traffic jam for over one hour because of a protest from school children of a village.

We reached Gulmarg at around 12 in the afternoon. The sight was amazing. We decided not to waste more time and go up the snow capped peak. Gulmarg has a trolley service which takes you all the way upto the peak, and we did just that. Once we got into the cable car, a few of us were kinda nervous about its stability. someone remarked that the trolley was struck with lightning last month, and it was getting just a bit cloudy ! Nevertheless the ride was smooth up the mountain. When we got down, it was all white on the ground. There were some skiers, who were offering us a ride to a nearby point from where we could see the LOC. 3 of us tried that while Gabbar managed to run on the snow. After a few patel shots at the peak, we decided to go back. Gabbar meanwhile had managed to run quite far , enought to attract the attention of the army posted there in outposts. Luckily enough the army was from our country and Gabbar managed to come back after a few threats from them.

While going back, we decided to walk down for a short distance. Within minutes we found ourselves walking on plush green meadows intercepted by streams of water running down the mountain. Pink, yellow and green flowers, added to the beauty of these meadows, and made our walk really amazing. It ended up to be a good 1 hour climb down to the place where we left our car. Without wasting more time, we drove back to Srinagar with a small break in between for tea and samosas .

Mission Kashmir - Srinagar (Day Two)

2008-05-18T12:20:00.004+05:30

The plan for the next day was to go sight seeing around Srinagar. After a lot of persuation, all of us woke up from our peaceful sleep. We had hired a Qualis to take us around the city. We started the tour with a visit to the Shankaracharya temple set on a small hill. The view from the hill itself was amazing. We could see the whole of Srinagar city, including the beautiful Shikaras and houseboats on Dal lake. From the temple we moved to the dal lake itself, which was really really beautiful. We took a 3 hour ride in a Shikara which was totally worth the 700 bucks we paid for it. The shikara took us all around the lake including all the local attractions like "The Char chinar" and "The vegetable market". The lake itself is right in between the valley surrounded on all sides by mountains. Together with lotus plants and water lillies, the view was completely breathtaking. One of the cool things which I noticed was mobile shops on shikaras. These ranged from fruit sellers to people selling kesar, ornaments etc.. to tourists.

We ended the shikara trip with some good food at one of the decent hotels near dal lake. Not to mention the boys were really lazy after that, but we somehow managed to end up in some of the famous gardens of Srinagar. We visited the Pari mahal, mughal gardens and the Shalimar Gardens. The gardens were full of roses and various other flowers amounting to over 50 different colours. Being in such a beautiful garden right in middle of a valley was simply mind blowing. There were quite a lot of snaps being clicked since we had two D-SLRs with us along with a point and shoot camera.

From the gardens we moved on to the famous Hazratbal shrine, situated on the shores of Dal lake. A lot of us were awed by the sceneic beauty of the place itself, a source of some of our best snaps. We ended the day with some "light" dinner at the guest house, which for some reason included Mutton rogan josh as a part of its lightness !

Mission Kashmir - Take Off (Day one )

2008-05-18T12:12:00.003+05:30

An impromptu decision to actually take a vacation a few weeks back, made us sit on a plane all the way to Srinagar (yes you read it right, its in Kashmir). At that time Sreekant (a.k.a Gabbar) was in China, Ranjan was in Pune, Akshay, Irfan and me the only ones in Banaglore. Considering the unpredictability of our work, life, and habits, I would say it was really a miracle that all 5 of us made it to the Bangalore airport at six in the morning on a Sat. Gabbar felt it was a great achievement looking back at his track record of how many flights he had missed. Akshay was also pretty pleased with the effort he had put in to wake up after getting drunk for some unknown reasons, the previous night.

Kingfisher airlines provided us with some decent breakfast and then we landed in Delhi. Our connecting flight to Srinagar was after 2 hours. We managed to find a lounge bar at the airport where few of us got some beer. We also managed to get some coffee, some muffins, and even a mc donalds burger at the airport. All this, just about an hour after having breakfast on the plane !

We were all excited about the next flight to Srinagar, since no one had actually gone there other than Irfan who was actually a local (Now that was one of our main motivations for this trip ;- ) ). The view from the flight was not great since it was a cloudy day. But once we came out of the airport after clearing the formalities, we were greeted with such a sceneic view of the valley, which no words can describe. To top it all, the fresh and cool breeze blowing, was priceless to us bangaloreans. Irfan ensured that we got a taxi and reached the guest house which he had arranged. The guest house itself was beautiful, set in a quiet residential area, with a big lawn in front of it. Some of the servants there were actually playing cricket and we joined them. We played for almost 3 hours in the cool breeze and it was mind blowing.

Irfan called us home for dinner. Irfan's mom had cooked the most delicious dinner that some of us would have had in the last 10 years ! I wont go into the details of it as it might need another blog entry by itself, but that just rocked the day !!!

Life on a slow gear.

2007-08-12T13:34:00.000+05:30

It has been over three weeks since I am back from Sydney. I have mostly been on vacation in Delhi, lazing at home, doing nothing which is quite amazing. I have decided to opt for the slower lane to drive my life, for the next year or so, rethinking and changing my lifestyle to scale the near future. Should be interesting, updates to follow soon.

Everything comes for a big price down under.

2007-06-11T12:25:00.000+05:30

Even though, Sydney is such a scenic city, and so is most of Australia, all this really comes at a price. And that you find out after you have lived here for a decent time.

Everything here is expensive. Firstly books. You almost end up paying double the cost, if you buy it from any of the shops here like Dymocks, A&R, or Borders. It might just end up cheap, if you buy it on Amazon and ship it all the way from US !!!.

Electronics are another story altogether. A simple comparison would be a basic MAc book pro, which costs around 4000$ here, which is probably the most expensive price to pay for a Mac in (better part of ;-) ) the world.

Ah, and you can definitely forget about buying clothes here. Beleive me its insane !!! You would get anything you buy from here, for less than half the price in India. And I am talking about some decent stores here, like Billbong, QuickSilver, Myer, General Pants etc.. Same goes with shoes as well !

Maybe the only thing you can probably buy and take home, would be a bottle of wine !

Sydney to Blue mountains

2007-05-28T19:30:00.000+05:30

Haven't been doing anything really exciting of late other than gulping beer and wine, so four of us here in Sydney decided to head for the "Blue mountains". The last time I went there was by car to see some cool cave formations. This time we decided to take a train early morning to Katoomba, and figure our way out on our own.

It turned out to be much more fun this time. After a good english breakfast at Katoomba , we took the so called "Explorer bus" which allowed us to hop in/out of the bus whenever we wanted, and took us to a lot of vista points around the mountains. The day being nice and sunny, we were greeted with great views of the mountain range, especially the popular "Three sisters". The cable car rides across the valley were mind blowing as well. The best part was actually a small railway carriage ride, which is considered to be among the steepest in the world. We also managed a couple of bush & cliff walks which led us to lot of great look out points.

Towards the evening we retired into a small motel, where we played cards whole night , ending with talking about Life, the Universe and everything ! The next lazy morning we woke up late and took a train back to Sydney, playing cards again for 2 hrs ! In all , a nice weekend getaway !

"I say chaps..."

2007-05-13T17:42:00.000+05:30

We bought a silly new dvd player today, and inaugurated it with the old classic, Fauji . It reminded me of those old school days, way back in 1988 (whew!) , when it was a great topic of discussion in school. It was also nice to watch it with Irfan, who had also seen it when it was first aired.

Fauji is really a classic, and if you want to catch a glimpse of the good old Doordarshan classic , do look here . (Needless to say that Shah Rukh Khan looks great in it. )

Incredible India

2007-02-12T16:53:00.000+05:30

Spotted on the Monorail at Darling harbor, Sydney!

Size does matter.

2007-02-10T18:04:00.000+05:30

A nice concept. Watching the sport on a big screen. I saw the Aus Open for a while last weekend, and this weekend I am gonna catch the Eng v/s Aus match on a big screen as well. The best part I like is , I dont need to go to a pub to get this kinda experience !

Cricket Australia ?

2007-02-10T17:50:00.000+05:30

So .. luckily I got a chance to experience a bit of the Club cricket in Australia this weekend. Thanks to Abhik, the captain (er..PM) on my project who also captains a club team, for giving me chance to play :-). Though I did not have a gr8 contribution to the team score, I really enjoyed being on the field. You never get these kinda grassy grounds in India. And yeah, it was first time with a cricket ball, a white jersey etc..So.. indeed cool stuff ! ( Yeah I did take a catch , and did some decent fielding too )

Sunshine in Sydney

2007-02-07T16:29:00.000+05:30

Its been more than a couple of weeks since I have been in Sydney. Of late I have been joined by my colleague Irfan. We share a 3b/r apartment bang in the middle of Sydney. From my past travel experiences this is one of the best houses I have lived in. Of course we pay a huge rent, but I do not mind that, since the firm we consult for, is housed in the building next to ours. So going to work is almost getting down our building , and getting up the office one.

Work is decent and challenging, and it keeps me occupied for most of the day. We start work here pretty early, around 8 am and finish by 5-5.30pm. Sydney has the concept of food courts, which are open during weekdays only. You get a lot of choices under one roof, and we have an awsome food court right opposite our office/apartment (u know its all so closeby ;-)). We head to the food court most of the time for lunch. And you know what, we get everything from kadi chaawal to falafal there !Evenings are morerelaxed during weekedays. We try to cook dinner by ourselves sometimes, or manage with ready to eats.

Weather in Sydney is awsome. It is summer, but being close to a water body,there is some wind chill which keeps the place cool atleast in the city centre. Sydney has an awsome train system, which connects to a lot of places, including suburbs. The bus service is also decent but I havent tried it yet.

People are really nice and helpful around the city. Yes, it is a cosmopolitian place with people from Korea, China, S'pore, India etc... I do not feel a lot away from home, because you get a lot of Indian food and Indian grocery easily here. There are quite a good number of Indian restaurants around the city.Moreover they play all the popular Indian movies within the city cinemas. Wonderful part is I see a lot of Chinese and Australian people also watching the movie. (Esp.Guru :-) ) Another thing I like a lot here, is that it is a cricketing nation , and I can actually watch cricket on the telly !

Have not been around much since I was staying alone all this while. But yeah, I did go to the Opera house, Botanical gardens, Harbour bridge etc... to click some snaps. Will be doing more of that from now on. My colleague Badri has been really helpful in showing me around the place. Some good experiences were, watch the Oz open , and the Cricket tri-series on big screens with a huge crowd cheering along , near the Opera house.

We tried out Coopers Ale, and liked it a lot. Our refrigerator now always stores a six pack of it. Thanks to Chris for recommending it :-). All in all , it seems like a city with a good mix of culture and mordenism. Will slowly explore more of it, and yeah, hoping to see a Kangaroo soon !

Cheers !

Off to Sydney

2007-01-18T13:48:00.000+05:30

I am off to Sydney tonight, for 3 months, as a part of another consulting engagement after the Mumbai one. Been lots of travel of late, but I guess this place will be a whole new experience for me ! Watch this space for more new snaps and updates ;-) (i.e if you have that much time on earth ! )

I have been hit by the supernatural, its official !

2006-12-23T00:42:00.000+05:30

You know this for sure, when the most weird things happen, which can happen to hardly 1 in a million people, and that 1 is you. Yeah.. it has happened to be more than once now, that makes me blog in the middle of the night !

My good ol bank sends me this notice "Dear Customer, We regret to inform you that the documents and proofs of identity and address given by you at the time of account opening have been fully damaged by flooding in the storage areas caused by heavy rains. The natural disaster was most unfortunate ". And more so they want me to submit the proofs of my identity and income documents all over again ! Wtf... ! As if I told them store my documents near a sea shore for kicks ;-) !

Here's another one . I just landed in Bangalore airport and waited near the baggage belt for my bag until the belt stopped and there was only one bag left on it. It was ditto similar to my bag, but I knew from the bottom of my heart, that it wasnt mine. And it wasnt. Some smart ass , took my bag thinking it was his, and might still be looking for his pyjamas in my bag, while I have his right here at the airport !

Cmon, how often such things happen to you on the same day ! Whew ! God Save me !

Svn Status

2006-11-08T13:03:00.000+05:30

Created SvnStatus for fun in .net system tray !

Downloads - Installer, Code .

Prerequisites - .net 2.0 , SVN Commandline

Got published

2006-10-24T21:55:00.000+05:30

Thanks to The Hindu...

For publishing my article.

I can smell some good coffee at last

2006-08-29T22:33:00.000+05:30

Starbucks plans to open outlets in India in early 2007. First ones in Delhi and Mumbai. I bet they will be in Namma Bengaluru in no time !. Some good coffee at last, but I do hope they slash their prices a bit for the Indian market.

Not another Independence day...

2006-08-15T15:41:00.000+05:30

Fortunately or not, I have been working for the IT industry in Bangalore, for around four years now. And so have been thousands of graduates in this city. All get sky level salaries as soon as they step inside an IT company. Most people, work day and night to develop software for multi million dollar firms outside India, to make them do better business. A good number of IT guys are just focused on how to get better salaries by changing jobs and taking advantage of the market conditions. There are some , who wish to work either in the US or UK, and are waiting for a chance, that somehow one day, the project they are working on might get them there.

Since these are a well educated lot, they do understand a lot of issues that our very own country is facing. And some times these are brought up, in some of the lounge bar outings, where the alcohol consumed per hour is billed to their foreign clients. There are passionate people, with whom you can engage in a great conversation even when drunk, whether it be corruption in real estate, or bad roads in Bangalore, or even illiteracy or alternative sources of energy. Everyone wants to do something, but have reasons for which they cant, and once the party is over, the next day everyone is back to their daily routine.

Some people say, they want to earn enough first, so that later they can leave the job and do some social work. But little do they realize, that with their monthly salaries, that day will never come. Some of my friends go to orphanages and help the kids , by paying their school fees , vaccination, books etc (I respect them , since I have not even attempted that) ,but is that enough. ? I think , we can do a lot more. When have we thought of writing software , for some of the needy institutions in India, who cannot afford it. When have we thought that the old Pentium PCs that our company IS dept. throws away can be used by some small schools to teach the kids. Why can’t we take time off on a Sat, and teach free of cost (anything, even programming languages) for people who cannot even think of affording it.

Many in our IT world, would just write blogs like me, but thankfully a few like Rohit, will take some great steps towards making a better country. Yes, we are part of the ‘Rang De Basanti’ generation and we need to wake up ! Happy Independence Day !

Some cool lines

2006-08-03T00:15:00.000+05:30

From the Tamil movie ShahJahan - song "Meliname.."

"Bhagawaan pesuvadum illai, Bhaktium koraivadhum illai...
Yen Kaadhalium pesavum illai, Yen Kaadhal koraivadhum illai... "

Read Joel on Software...

2006-08-02T23:42:00.000+05:30

Since I had read a lot of books around programming and software management practices I never read Joel On Software seriously. I happened to read a lot of old articles by Joel (since 2001) recently. Each and every article taught me something new in software project management or programing in general. I actually grabbed the book that compiles all the articles., so I can read them offline. Highly recommened for any software developer, even if you have read the Mythical man month, the code complete and the pragmatic programmer series .

All articles are available at the site - > www.joelonsoftware.com

Tamil songs on Sun Music...

2006-08-02T23:38:00.000+05:30

I leave the television tuned to "Sun Music" and do other work, and they do a good job of playing really good requests. Except for some of their irritating VJ talk, the music is nice. The best part for me is that, they will surely play an Asin or Simran song video every hour ! ;;-)

"Away days" from work should stick to that

2006-08-02T23:26:00.000+05:30

Most companies have the concept of "Away days" . Many call it company retreat, office outing, picnics etc... I have no idea why but, the management of an organization always thinks of coupling this with some great speeches from the CEO on that day, or discussions on financials, or the company's latest products. Even if these "M" creatures know that everyother person will pass sarcastic/witty/humorous comments abou these sessions in the nearest restroom or smoking area, they will still continue to organize such things. Maybe, since they spend some money, they feel some "gyan" should be imparted from their side in a dilbert style even if not a soul wants to listen.

I say that you get the real money's worth if you can get everyone (Even the "M" types) in high spirits, with booze, cricket, football, dance whatever. An Away day should just mean fun,Fun,FUN and nothing else! It never solves any purpose otherwise !

And you thought that enterprise software is boring ?

2006-08-02T23:13:00.000+05:30

Martin puts it in the true spirit

"I've often heard it said that enterprise software is boring, just shuffling data around, that people of talent will do "real" software that requires fancy algorithms, hardware hacks, or plenty of math. I feel that this usually happens due to a lack of customer affinity. The real intellectual challenge of business software is figuring out what the real contribution of software can be to a business. You need both good technical and business knowledge to find that. Working closely with business people to develop this knowledge, and PleasingTheCustomer as you do it, is what makes enterprise software development fun - and motivation is the key to good and productive work. "

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/CustomerAffinity.html

Are you still in your comfy shell ?

2006-08-02T22:32:00.000+05:30

I start feeling very comfortable when my life is "routined". By that what I mean is if everyday morning I just get up and pick up my bike and go to office, write some code for the project I work for, and come back after dinner. Simple life, but it confines me to a certain shell. And that shell takes me away from a lot of good things. For example, in my case, if I go in my bike everyday, which I know how to drive pretty well, I never will learn driving any other vehicle. Also I would never know about the latest public transport in the city and their rates ( yeah the volvo buses) .

I am not saying you should take some "violin" classes, which if you do out of interest will be great. But what I mean is try and keep breaking out of your repetitive cycle in life. another example might be the kind of websites you read everyday morning. If you read rediff.com , regularly, read slashdot.org sometimes. If you are a programmer and read all about .net, try reading Zen and the Art of motorcycle management and for a change understanding it ;-) .
If you read timesofindia, read the washington post or , The Economist to get an idea of whats happening in world economy.

You can start doing this very very easily. The motivation behind this should be that, if you are stuck to something comfortably, you are missing out on a lot the world has to offer. And of course you have one life and you need to make most of it !

Powercut on Sundays...

2006-07-23T13:53:00.000+05:30

For the third consecutive Sunday, I have seen a day long powercut in Bangalore. It just drives you nuts when it is the same scheduled power cut for some stupid "maintainence work". What bothers me more is that this happens only on a Sunday, and from 10am - 5pm. The whole area, under 5km radius of the Airport is blacked out on sundays. Around 60% of the households in this area are for sure populated by techy couples, or bachelors working for the neighbourhood IT shop, who only get a Sunday to stay at home, and maybe sip some coffee with a newspaper, under a fan, rather than the usual daily dose of Java code. With bad roads, bad traffic, insanely crowded malls and multiplexes, now one cant even relax at home !

Natural Lighting

2006-07-10T23:24:00.000+05:30

My colleague Zak once pointed out to me the importance of natural lighting in the office and the effects it can have on you. Honestly, I did not give it that much importance until I started working in our Chicago office. Our work area in Chicago had natural sunlight coming through all the time. The big and beautiful glass windows almost made us feel the outside weather, while sitting in the comfort of the office. However, the work area we have in Bangalore office , is far away from all the windows, and we totally rely on artifical lighting. While working here, I never know what time of the day it is, until I forcibly look at my watch or catch a glimpse of my laptop clock. Once I am too engrossed in work, I totally get disconnected from nature. This also leads to working, during crazy hours of the day, since I anyways do not get to see the sunlight.

Small things do make a difference indeed. Invite the sunlight to your workarea! Its powerful!

Dont kill my villagers !!!

2006-07-01T16:25:00.000+05:30

I just came in to the office today ( Sat afternoon) to be greeted with some old familiar sounds, that of the Age Of Empires. I have known Ajey and Nila since the day I joined Thoughtworks, and they have been playing AoE ever since. A lot has happened in their lives since then and now. They were bachelors then, and now even after they became great family men ;-) , their passion for the good old game still continues. True AoE lovers !

Of course, unlike certain old AoE characters in the office who migrated to foreign lands and never showed up again, and some who vowed not to play the game again, blaming it to interfere their personal lives ;-), without knowing how to balance both. Also some have chosen to read about dragons at home , instead of using their onagers in the arena !

Blogging at the terminal

2006-07-01T16:21:00.000+05:30

I am writing this sitting at the airport terminal at O’hare, Chicago , waiting for my flight to Bangalore. It was amazing how six weeks just flew by, with so many people around you. This was the third short trip I made to the US, and I never felt I was in a new country. The great part is of course the amount of confidence you gain by traveling and by meeting new people of different cultures. 2 years back, I was waiting at the same airport desperately for the flight to take off with nothing else going on in my mind, and ironically now, I have pulled out my laptop, to write a blog entry!

Lost in Chicago

2006-06-18T10:43:00.000+05:30

I was looking at the calendar after a long time, and saw that it was over a month since I had been in Chicago. Quite interestingly, this time around, there were so many of my friends and colleagues in town, that I never had a chance of getting bored. We have been making plans of doing something or the other everyday, from tasting new cuisines, checking out new pubs , making trips etc...

Among the most exciting things were sitting on the DisneyLand California Screaming roller coaster that goes 360 degrees, and the Universal Studios LA experience. The RockBottom brewery in Chicago saw me coming there thrice in last 2 weeks, and the last visit ended up getting a pitcher of beer and a tequila shot. The glazed Dunkin Donut and the Starbucks vanilla latte with the blueberry coffe cake have become a routine snack. The Hooters Chicken wings and beer combo was pretty interesting as well.

This has been my 3rd short visit to US, and quite weirdly, I feel like I am almost at home, or maybe not quite that far from it.

Good one from Joel

2006-04-18T23:32:00.000+05:30

Joel talks about why you start feeling as a programmer that you can build the coolest product on your own... and why it might not happen the way you thought!

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html

New home !

2006-04-13T10:17:00.000+05:30

Its been a long time since I blogged.. I moved to my small n nice flat last month. The feeling of sleeping in a place which you have bought with your own money is really great. You got to do it to beleive it ! Even though, being a one bed room flat, I felt great that I have achieved this much on my own.

Now I have breakfast at home itself. My kitchen is decently equipped with stuff to cook. I can watch TV for as many hours Ii want ! I got a broadband internet connection, which allows me to logon to the world as soon as I wake up !

Thanks to my close relatives,friends and colleagues , who helped me go through all the documentation, loan proceedings, registration etc.. Whew!

What Gurgaon has and Bangalore does not !

2005-10-19T20:46:00.000+05:30

While I was traveling in an autorickshaw in Bangalore ( The software capital of India ) over a weekend , we got stuck in a traffic jam in Airport road.. this was mostly because of the flyover work which has been in progress since last 2. years now and is not even 50% complete. Since we were stuck for a long time I started a small conversation with the driver asking him when he thinks the flyover will be built and he started cribbing about the pitiful progress made in that direction and had lost all hopes of its completion.

Weekdays I travel to a client office which is in Gurgaon near New Delhi from my house by a cab. There is again a flyover being built over the NH-8 which links Delhi to Gurgaon and there is almost always a traffic jam. I cribbed a bit about how sad the state of the road was, but to my surprise, the driver said “Saahab , ek do mahina adjust kar lengey, phir dekhna kya mast road hoga, “ ( “Just adjust for a couple of months, and then see how beautiful this road will become”). Such a positive mindset cannot be built among citizens without fulfilling some promises. The Delhi govt. has been on a real flyover spree and has built over 8-10 flyovers in last couple of years, some of them having over 20 passing combinations possible.

Also what struck me was this signboard in Bangalore saying “Flyover work in progress” and this signboard in Gurgaon saying “Flyover work in progress, please bear the inconvenience for a better tomorrow”.

Surely the citizens of Delhi have a brighter tomorrow for their life on the road !

Laying back and watching the world for a while...

2005-10-08T20:24:00.000+05:30

Its been nice to be back as a consultant, to my very own home town. I get to stay with my parents and eat home cooked food ! This is giving me a lot of opportunity to think and rethink certain important things that have been affecting my life , of which i never cared before. Some of these thoughts have led me to look at life at a different angle, which has been pretty cool !

I try to follow a strict 9-5.30 schedule in office which is giving me enough time to spend at home, with family and over the internet. I try to spend as much time reading books or blogs whichever is easily accessible.

So no late night pizzas at office, and no games ! ( No AoE for a while ! )

The World is Flat...

2005-09-22T23:19:00.000+05:30

I just finished reading the book The World is Flat, by Thomas Freidman. It was really an amazing read. Thanks to Vivek Singh for motivating me to read it, by quoting interesting excerpts from the book time and again on our plane ride from Delhi-Bangalore. I am thinking of posting some excerpts from the book, which were really fascinating for me in my later post. While finishing the book at this hour in the night I remembered my childhood prayer

Thank you God for the food we eat..
Thank you God for the water we drink..
Thank you God for the birds that sing.............. and so on..

I think the next generation would most likely be ..

Thank you Man for the electricity we use...
Thank you Man for the internet we have...
Thank you Man for the mobile conn we made...
and Thank you Man that now the world is flat !

Another Blog of mine

2005-09-22T19:41:00.000+05:30

I decided to start another blog with quite a weird theme. Its called I might die soon !

The Consultant Backpack

2005-09-07T23:16:00.000+05:30

I have been traveling quite a lot this time of the year. Earlier it was to the state of New York, and now it is to New Delhi ! So I was wondering what a prefect consultant backpack/toolkit should contain ? For fun sake I thought of jotting down all those..

Lets see…

Laptop (of course !)
Network cable ( a long one if you dont have a wirless router, so that it reached ya bed !)
Wireless router ?
Thumb Drive
Writeable CDs

A decent book. (For the boring plane rides and the airport delays )
Water bottle
A toothbrush (huh !)
Cellphone (For the lonely long walks )
RSA ids ?
iPod
Minor stationary (pen,pencils, sheets..)

Frequent flier cards.
Credit cards.

.. More ?

Disabled due to technology – The shortcut handicap

2005-09-07T23:03:00.000+05:30

I am so used to using IntelliJ or Eclipse shortcuts, that I feel handicapped without them. More so if my pair doesnt use them it gets even more irritating. Once it so happened that my pair was typing such a long java variable name, that I felt a strong urge to snatch the keyboard from him and hit the damn Ctrl space ( to use the completion feature in the IDE).

But what if you have all the high quality (read expensive) softwares running on limited hardware..... I have to run the IDE as well as the App Server together on my machine which uses up almost all of my RAM.

Due to the hardware limitations , my IDE runs really slow So earlier I used to find a method in a class using Ctrl F12(IntelliJ) or Ctrl o (Eclipse), but on this slow running version of Eclipse IDE , I have to use Ctrl F ;-)

More so, before I use a particular shortcut, I need to think twice whether its gonna consume a lot of memory and CPU cycles compared to navigating the code manually. Oh God !

Looks like I am heading backwards in time !

No business for BAs.

2005-08-29T23:23:00.000+05:30

I actually landed up in a weird situation a few days back when working on a story. The story asked us to implement a certain functionality as-is in the older website which we were migrating. The business asked us devs to find out what the functionality was in the old website, tell them, and implement the same as well in the new site !!! Adding more to it, there was no one to validate whether developer findings were correct or not.

Wonder where this will go .. scary !

Consulting in my own country !

2005-08-29T23:10:00.000+05:30

Since last week, I am back into consulting mode. Whats different this time is that I travel within India itself. Most of us on the project do Mon-Fri and are back home on weekends. More than the work, I have been having fun hanging out with ThoughtWorkers after office , over dinner , playing pool etc... Most of us have numerous number of stories to tell by the end of each day !

The major plus point is that I get to have Indian food, and play a client facing role, all at the same time !. So no more surviving on pathetic veg soups / boca burgers for some consulting experience ! Whew !!!

Flying Kingfisher Class

2005-07-23T11:10:00.000+05:30

I recently flew Kingfisher Airlines from Delhi to Bangalore. More than the fact that I could get a pretty cheap ticket on a 4 day notice, there were so many other facts which realy makes this airline different.

What they believe in is to provide an amazing "Flying Experience". So as soon as I entered the airport I was escorted by a Kingfisher crew member who handled everything right from my baggage screening to getting me checked in the flight.

As I boarded the brand new aircraft, I could feel that this flight could be a lot different than many others I had taken. They had individual TV screens for each passenger, with quite a decent line up of TV/Radio programmes. I dont think any domestic carrier in India does this. The food served in the flight was a lot better than any other airline food I have ever tasted.

I booked my tickets through tele-booking which was simple and fast, but I also heard they have an online booking facility on there site which is quite amazing as well.

How can I miss the amazing crew huh ! They had an awsome line up of gorgeous ladies dressed in red and white, truly standing up to the Kingfisher class!

So if you are flying in the Delhi-Bombay-Bangalore sector I would highly recommmend trying out this upcoming airline !

Lost in Vegas

2005-07-21T16:33:00.000+05:30

I had a blast with three of my friends during the long weekend of July 4. We planned to spend the best part of it (all the nights esp. ) on the Las Vegas Strip. Describing the night life in my limited high school english vocabulary would be a waste.. hence a short blog entry ;-) . We also happened to take an SUV to teh Grand Canyon where we tried to get a bit adventurous , trying to click snaps hanging around the cliffs.

XP when 'Working from Home'

2005-06-24T06:49:00.000+05:30

After a long time I am back into a project where I work at the client office. Most of my colleagues travel to work on Monday and leave on Friday. Taking a flight every Monday morning and Friday evening , can become really painful in the long run. It becomes tough to sustain the same pace. One solution is that work from home on Friday, or give an option to work from home to get pending work completed.

Sounds fine , but the problem comes when you try to sustain the XP best practices like Pair Programming/Rotation, Collective code ownership etc. I beleive that once the door to "work from home" is opened, it breaks the XP cycle there and then. Since each XP practice is dependent on another practice, for example without pairing, refactoring, it is really difficult to gain the benefits of collective code ownership.

Also it leads to the problem , that newbies to XP , who are sceptical about pairing, might be drifted to the option of working from home, than try out and see whether they can benefit from pair programming.

Imagine the horror, when a fellow developer decides to go on a refactoring spree over the weekend , and checks in all the code , all alone ! Monday morning , rest of the team will have to spend some significant time understanding what has happened over weekend. More problems come up, if some developers disagree to the approach. The cycle breaks, and people start owning pieces of the codebase.This might even give rise to a blame culture which is even more unhealthy for an XP team.

How to solve this issue ?

I am looking for ideas on this..

Off my head I can think of..

Remote pairing (using some XP tools available in market) ?
Individuals in the team not taking huge tasks alone (like big refactorings)
What people decide to work over weekend is decided on Thursday in a developer huddle.
People doing any imp stuff over weekend take a small session in the coming week to let the team know about it
Maybe have alternate weekends as 3 day weekends, stretch for 9 hrs a day to get stuff done. This way no one works on weekends and gets a long break once in 2 weeks.
Decide on core team hours ?

Small Tip for Web Services

2005-05-18T18:16:00.000+05:30

If you are hosting a webservice on a machine, and want to invoke a method on it from a remote machine through a browser , the browser might not show up the "Invoke" button straightaway.

If you still want it you mite need to uncomment the following lines of code in machine.config which will enable httpget and httppost.

I Found it useful when I am setting up the services from a remote box.

Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything ?

2005-05-15T18:21:00.000+05:30

If you google for the subject line you get an answer of 42 !

I was tempted to read the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'" by certain colleagues in the office who went on and on about the hunor in it. While finishing the first of the series of novels, one of the lessons I learnt was

"Look beyond your immediate surroundings. Dont narrow down your focus to only the problem you are currently working on. Think wider ! "

I started wondering, we keep cribbing about our jobs, friends, money etc... what if tomorrow the world does not exist at all. Indeed a lot of energy we would have wasted in sulking !

Reverse Engineering C# code to UML ?

2005-03-19T21:51:00.000+05:30

All of a sudden , I was pushed into the world of UML for a couple of days. What if you had all the code , and someone wanted UML diagrams out of it.

I had tried this with Java code long back and Poseidon worked really well. For C# , there are not many commercial tools which generate class diagrams with all the relationships out of the box. I tried a lot of tools including Visio, Poseidon etc.. but the best was Visual UML . All I had to do was use the Reverse Engineer option on the menu , and select my project file (.csproj), and within seconds , my class diagram for all the classes in the project is ready. No complex GUI and no cumbersome menu options !

Oh Taxes !

2005-03-19T21:01:00.000+05:30

Its that time of the year again, the last month of the financial year. As the accounts guys in office are sending their last reminder to the staff to submit their reimbursement bills, investment proofs etc.. the employees themselves are figuring all new ways to furnish evidences to reduce their taxable income.

I should really say , some of my friends/colleagues have really cool ideas in getting medical receipts, fuel bills and even charity receipts. I see colorful bills scattered all over my table, people filling up weird multi column excel sheets etc...

My team manager had some strong opinions on people with the so called "cool" ideas. According to him , "If they show the same energy and enthusiasm in probably making investments in mutual funds, equities etc... they can earn a lot more than the meagre sum they are trying to save using untruly methods ! ". Great but..whats more important to me than money, is the satisfaction of being honest and truthful.

On the contrary..addding fuel to the fire is the country's finance minister with his new budget. Salaried employees are being taxed more and more. Even fixed deposits in banks are now taxable and... no more corporate perks. "Huh !! atleast ..lemme minimise my taxes to the greatest extent!" - cries todays salaried employee.

Employees cry further more when they find out that they have to pay taxes to the Indian Govt. for income they earned in US/UK etc.. "Gosh , why shud I pay that much to the govt ?, all i get is bad roads and traffic jams , hmpf ! ". The same people file taxes promptly to the US/UK govt. but are reluctant to pay to their own countries governing body.

I just remembered I need to buy a house in Bangalore. With prices soaring to a new high, when will I be able to do that , if I keep paying my taxes religiously ??? :-(

Retrospectives and Six Thinking Hats.

2005-02-08T09:42:00.000+05:30

I was reading the book Six Thinking Hats. I started thinking of how we can use this method in conducting retrospectives for a team.

According to me, the way Owen has been facilitating retrospectives for our team, it really comes close to what has been proposed in the book.

Blue hat (organizing..)

We lay down the rules of the meeting. No cross talks, participation is optional etc..

White hat (facts..)

Our Iteration Manager gets his funky Excel sheet up to see our velocity in the last Iteration, The stories we played etc..

Yellow hat (Optimistic.. )

We always talk about what went right, and what can go right.

eg:- "We can make the release successfuly " , "If we spend less time in standup meetings, we can be more efficient"

Black hat (Pessimistic, negative..)

We talk about what went wrong in the past iteration

eg:- "If the build machine is not any faster, it will affect our velocity"

Red hat (feelings..)

Everyone expresses there feelings, opinions , towards a certain issue, if they have any.

eg:- "I feel that everyone in the team should pair "

Green hat (new ideas.. )

When most of the issues are on the white board, we as a team put on the green hat to brainstorm on new ideas to solve a given issue.

eg:- "I think we should split the build to make it faster !"

Blue hat (organizing..now optional )

We note down most of our notes, and maybe put it up in the team area so that the team can benefit.

Wondering whether I am missing something here ... ?

I feel like a resource !

2005-02-04T21:28:00.000+05:30

I did not know whether anyone will understand this but well.. its my blog so I can write anything.

I am a developer, and most of my job is to deliver a project with passion, with the best possible means,tools, practices and above all quality. I try to do my best everyday at work,mostly by writing nice code.

Sometimes I feel I am being used.. used like a resource.. used by managers of the team of course! Its like they put me on to something 'cos I might have worked on that before. Or maybe I can do it faster, or c'mon, noone else is ready to do it !

Think this happens to everyone. But people who are too focussed on their work do not recogonize it. Or maybe they do not care, or maybe they have given up and accepted it as their fate. Maybe they decided they will do the same when they become managers of that sorts.

I pity such people. Atleast I try to know when I am being used and if I cant do something about it, I feel bad about it, and can blog about it. :-)

Whats the solution ? What can I do ? Maybe become a manager next ? Will I be the same to the developers working with me ? Will I get carried away ? Dunno.

Till then.. as one Sports Illustrated catchline goes.." I will be playing poker.. and they will be playin me !"

Manipulating Binded Datasource at runtime is tricky..

2005-01-31T23:04:00.000+05:30

Its not that easy as we think to manipulate a collection that is bound to a combobox/listbox. This works out of the box if you are using a DataView but if you are using something like an ArrayList to bind you comboBox control, then the changes in the binded collection will not directly update the control collection.

However you can force this by calling SuspendBinding() and ResumeBinding() on the BindingContext. You might need to do something like this everytime you manipulate the collection..

{

// code...

BindingManagerBase bindingManagerBase = BindingContext[_documentTypeDTOList];

bindingManagerBase.SuspendBinding();

_documentTypeDTOList.Add(documentType); // manipulating and adding a new type at run
time.
_documentTypeComboBox.DataSource = __documentTypeDTOList;

_documentTypeComboBox.DisplayMember = "Name";

bindingManagerBase.ResumeBinding();

}

DataBindings in C# .net

2005-01-31T22:46:00.000+05:30

I found this interesting in C# the other day I was working on some GUI code. One can actually bind a widget (eg:- ComboBox to an IList ). The IList can be a collection of objects of any custom class, maybe even a DTO.

So if I have my custom class as

class DocumentTypeDTO
{
....
public string Name
{
get
{
return _name;
}
}
public string Type
{
//Getter
}
public string Code
{
//Getter
}
}

I can actually bind my control to an array of DTOs .

_documentTypeComboBox.DataSource = documentTypeDTOs;

To specify what member has to be used for display, I have a DisplayMember setter on my widget which takes a property name string.

_documentTypeComboBox.DisplayMember = "Name";

I can also define the value which will get picked up on the selection of a combobox item by:

_documentTypeComboBox.ValueMember = "Code";

Apparently .net uses reflection to get the members out . Sweet !!

Pair Programming with Pair rotation

2005-01-30T18:24:00.000+05:30

My colleague Vivek once blogged about the way we pair in our team. I would say it is like an acquired taste, some people like to pair and some do not. I used to hate pairing earlier , until in this project we started rotating pairs frequently. You get a chance to work with a different person every day, and get a different view of the codebase. Opinions vary and often new ideas come out.

To contrast what Vivek had written , our team size has scaled down temporarily to only 2 developers. Hence I am "stuck" with the same pair. What now happens is that we have developed almost the same kinds of opinion about the code. Over a period of time , it becomes really boring because you for sure know what your "life long" pair is thinking. So if this pair does not beleive in test-first development, you will never get a chance to do that as long as you pair with the same pair. That is probably why I feel we should change pairs after a max of 2 days. Best is to rotate pairs , when finished with a reasonably sized chunk of task.

There is definitely something to learn from every team member. Pair rotation gives you a chance to learn by working with each member closely.

Brent, Paul and I came up with 6 commandments for Pair Programming in our team .

No story work without a pair ..... ever.
Switch pairs often, ideally at the end of a reasonably sized task.
No heroes in the team. ( Everyone knows about the codebase well enough )
After pair switch , newbie to the story must drive.
Driver cannot drive for more than 10 minutes straight.
Driver should think out loud especially if it relates to lunch. ;-)

This worked well for a small sized team , a max of 4 pairs. Wonder what are the experiences in larger XP teams ...?

Standup meeting - Talking token

2005-01-30T17:05:00.000+05:30

One of the most common practices in XP teams is to have Standup meetings. Each team member starts by giving an update on what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today and any issues they are facing without actually trying to solve them in the meeting.

This works fine till one of the team member starts discussing a critical issue (eg:- "Oh the build machine is not working because...") , and every member starts voicing there own opinions. Sure recipe for a meeting hijack and future chaos !

We used something called a Talking Token. It can be something from a Kush Ball to a Hockey Stick. The token must be passed around, and each team member has the right to talk if he has the token. If you wish to voice an opinion, on an issue which someone else is discussing, wait for him to finish, and signal (mostly non verbal gesture preferable) for the token. This way we ensured that when one person talks everyone in the team listens patiently. More importantly , in big team standups, they atleast know who is talking.

I had read somewhere that a talking token should be a really heavy object (Like a 10 pound ball ?), and the speaker should hold out the token by stretching his hand. This would ensure that a person cannot speak for more than the ideal 3 minutes or so. Whew!

A nice end to my birthday

2005-01-23T13:45:00.000+05:30

Something different which I did to spend yesterday evening, was to watch a set of plays by Naseeruddin Shah called Katha Collage. This was the first time I had gone to watch a play, and to tell you what , the experience was amazing.

The dialogues, the sets, the music , and above all the acting was indeed mind blowing. No take, no retake, putting up such an awsome and hillarious performance , definitely deserved a standing ovation from all of us in the audience!

Working for a Services Firm in India isnt always fun..

2005-01-19T09:35:00.000+05:30

I work for an American services/consulting company , which has one of its offices here in Bangalore. In my past 2 years, I have been through a lot of projects and met a lot of new consultants.

The most weird part of the services industry is that most of the Indian consultants, just want to go client sites ("go abroad", "go onsite", whatever u wanna call that ) and make a quick buck. The passion and even the intention to successfully deliver the project you are currently doing is really missing in these people. All they think is "When will they send me to US ? ", "How can I increase my stay there ?", etc... As a team member , when u see your colleagues working with this kind of attitude, it is very discouraging.

From what I hear from a lot of my friends, I guess it is to a lesser extent in my firm , than in a lot of Indian MNCs, who still encourage body shopping ! Wondering when will that change !

There is more to it when people's priorities are like these. They tend to manipulate at work and try to get into the spotlight of their bosses, which in my opinion, is the worst to happen.

Microsoft Support Rocks !!

2005-01-17T13:27:00.000+05:30

It was my first experience with Microsoft Support. We were facing a problem of not being able to debug an Office (Word , Excel etc..) Addin component we were devloping under VS.net. Through some of our contacts in Thoughtworks, we manged to get in touch with an XP Evangelist and BdotNet member Deepak Gulati in Microsoft itself. He promptly put us in touch with Leo, a Microsoft Support Engineer whose expertise was in Development Tools etc..

Leo was amazing in solving the issues we were facing, with regards to following up with us, and even accessing our machine with Remote Assistance to fix the problem.

He also made us understand that we were unable to debug the word Addin due to a conflict of dlls b/w (1.1 and 2.0 beta) . The problem was more so , because we were copying the dlls to the Word install directory for Word to pickup, which was not required, since Word picks it up from the install directory itself.

Now you know that if you are developing using Microsoft Tools and you have a problem which is out of your reach, you know whom to contact with your MSDN subscription.

Microsoft Support Rocks !

The Microsoft COM hell

2005-01-11T10:03:00.000+05:30

In my current project we have a short release which involves writing addins for Microsoft components like Word, Excel Outlook etc.. It might sound cool until you actually get into writing some COM interop code.

There are some funny things you might need to do when you are calling a class in another namespace from your office addin, i.e doing an interop.

Firstly you need to have a Guid for identifiying the interop class. This apparently is used for registering this class as an interop in the registry
Secondly you need to set a property at the project level in VS.net, "Register for COM interop = true".
If you are using an installer , the you need to make sure that in the properties of this project , you have the property "Register" set to "vsdraCOM".

If that is not enough, if you do not do any of the above, you do not get any pretty error messages that tell you to do so. Your addin might just stop working all of a sudden or will work on one box and stop working on the other. Hmpf!!

To add to all this, the documentation for COM is really pathetic , even in MSDN. The best resource for you are blogs of those unfortunate developers , who have suffered the pain and agony of working with Microsoft components

We are still backward in Urban India

2005-01-09T21:45:00.000+05:30

For quite some time I have been wondering about how mature is the thinking of people in our Urban households. I got reminded of the same when I was watching the movie Swades. We show in big screen that a lot of castism and bias based on religion is prevalent in rural areas of the country. I went ahead asking myself the same question , in the context of our urban households.
For an important thing as marriage, we are still looking for bride/groom from the same caste , relegion sect etc.. IMHO this is true for almost 70% of the educated Indian citizens living in big towns and cities. We have still not been able to educate our own parents/relatives/friends to be more mature and broad minded in their thinking., which is really sad.

But there are definitely some people who are trying to do their very bit in the urban society. For example, Times of India Matrimonials, give a 10% discount on ads which do not demand caste and relgion. Way to go Times !

Development can be fun if the team is Self Organizing

2005-01-02T18:41:00.000+05:30

I have been working over 8 months as a developer in an XP team. From the beginning itself the team had been striving to be self organizing, in terms of the tasks we pick up everyday, to how we execute them. A typical day for me started by giving a small update to the whole team , during a standup meeting, then picking up one of the many tasks lined up for the day. This was amazing because every other day, I was allowed to choose what kind of task I wanted to do.

And you signup for the task, with another person and form a pair. When the pair is finished with a reasonably sized chunk of task , we decide to switch pairs, normally this happens the next day.
This allowed us to work closely with all the people in the team, instead of being stuck with one pair for weeks ! (C'mon what if that one pair never took bath..huh !)

Every pair was free to decide how they wanted to go about executing a task in hand. They were free to make any technical decisions. A lot of us , got to the whiteboard at times to draw diagrams, but we were all developers and no one was a so called funky architect. Of course , at a later stage we did form a common metaphor for the project.

Indeed we have an iteration manager for the team, but he was amazing in managing the client expectations, and abstracting the team from a lot of unnecessary client pressure.

Yes there are many ups and downs in such a teams lifecycle which might blog about later. But there is a brief and interesting article here :

http://www.controlchaos.com/download/Self%20Organization.pdf
which some of you might be interested.

A Silent Welcome to 2005

2005-01-01T13:52:00.000+05:30

One of my new year resolutions was to start blogging. And hence this exists.. !