Going Live

Last night when the world was sleeping my collegaues working on the project for a prestigious Colombo bank sent me an SMS - "We are going Live". Apparently the final round of testing went on till wee hours in the morning. I happened to read it at 4:30 am ( I am an early riser) and promptly sent a quick reply "Great". Indeed this is a great achievement to have this day stare at us. When I first drew the project plan I wasn't sure if we would see this day so quickly considering the that we had to customise the applications in two flavours - one set of features made its way into the core application while another set were delivered as separate artefacts; migrate the legacy data; and implement and configure the application. All the while working with people of different culture and paradigm. We missed the date in the schedule, however within a span of 30 days we were on track and are ready to transition the application to "Business As Usual". Thats about a month behind the original schedule of 9 months thats a delay of about 11%.

Colombo

My trip to Colombo this time was rather hurried. To make it worse there were meetings scheduled throughout the day. I hardly had the time to explore the city. "Explore SriLanka", which I picked up at the arrival lounge listed a new restaurant "Thambapani" on Duplication Road however incessant rains kept me indoors. I had to skip even my regular stops - Barefoot, Lanka Ceramics, Paradise Road. I had Shashsi Tharoor's, Bookless in Baghdad for company.

"Bookless in Baghdad" is a collections of essays and personal reflections of Shashi Tharoor on matters literary, several of which have been published in newspapers like The Hindu and New York Times in the past.

The book gives has an excellent start and the prose is fluid, spiced with anecdotes, quotes, humour and unconsciously a bit of trivia. Tharoor's writing is light as he approaches each essay without prejudice; difficult for someone who is a writer and a reviewer of books himself. He refers to his own works - The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, Riot in several of these essays, the motivation for writing them and the reviews each of them have received. However these have been without literary blasphemy, which usually creeps in when an author talks or writes about his own work.

There is an essay for Wodehouse fans aptly titled "Right Ho, Sahib" capturing the Author's fascination for the master from his days in College at the prestigious St. Stephens, Delhi. The pleasure he derived from reading the Masters oeuvre is evident from the casual introspection of his collegiate days as a member of the Wodehouse club and his near attempt to write a letter to the Master himself.

In one of the essays the Author dismisses Nirad C Chaudri's Anglophone affiliation by dissecting the Autobiography of an unknown Indian (pun intended) and mocks his xenolatrous allegiance. "The committed Poet" is about the Spanish diplomat and Nobel Prize winning Litterateur Pablo Neruda. I must mention the piece on Sir Naipaul is particularly illuminating and goes on to trace Sir Vido's humble beginnings and the days in Oxford, particularly the correspondence between Sir Vido and his fond Pa, as he used to call his father. Salman Rushdie makes his appearance in several essays and the Authors description of Rushdie's first public appearance after emerging from hiding lets you relive the moment. Very interesting though is the Author's take on Indianness and his attempt to answer the question, Who is an Indian? The author traces the roots of the INC and systematically demolishes the statements of several politicians and takes pride in the rich diversity of our Rashtra. This critical commentary has me convinced, and has helped change my perspective on what is true nationalism while it has also made me realise there are still others waiting to be educated on this.

I must emphasis "Illiteracy in America", a shocking account of how 50 million Americans cannot read or comprehend things above the 8th grade level. What that means is that, these people don't possess the comprehension ability to understand the instructions for an antidote on an ordinary can of cockroach poison. Astonishing? Worse, to quote the author functionally illiterate which means they don’t have the ability to understand traffic signs or product labels. which makes these people unequipped for life in a modern society. And these it seem exist predominantly in the inner cities. All in a country with a single major language. Compare this with a developing nation like ours with 1200 officially recognised languages and about 22,000 dialects, we seem to be better off with the illiteracy being relegated to the rural areas. Paradoxically the following essay 81% of Americans feel that they should write a book! In several essays the theme is to portray India and its culture and dispel the western notion of India being a chaotic, poor and sluggish country though I am unsure if the Author set out to achieve this.

There is a hilarious account of the making of 'Show Business" by a Blondie Singh who called the Author from his bath tub. I cant imagine someone can have the arrogance of calling an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations during his ablations. So Blondie Singh, Mr. Bikram Singh to some and BJ (no mischievous smiles please!) to several others was excited and wanted to make a movie of the novel "Show Business" after the deal was signed Blondie showed the first draft of the screenplay - it was almost the entire novel, verbatim! The final movie had the credits "Lyrics by Shashi Tharoor"!

The book is an eclectic mix of Indian culture, Authors, Book Bazaars, about reading, writing and reviewing and is a delightful read especially in moments of solitude. Once you are done with the book you are likely to add items to your reading lists. I for sure did. I hope to read this book again in a few months.

Current Reads

Picked this up at the Landmark sale along with several other books last week. Onto the 4th chapter. Dylan Jones describes his adolescent years with LP's and Cassettes and his graduation to the MP3 era with an iPOD. As an ardent music fan with a collection of over 200 cassettes and an equal number of CD's its not very difficult to understand his plight. I got my 80GB iPOD a little over 6 months back, Only last week did I manage to complete loading all my CD tracks onto this. A good read if you grew up listening to Brian Ferry, Fleetwood Mac, Floyd...etc. The book has some interesting bits of Trivia LP : Longer Programming, iPOD : Internet Portable Object Device. The book is loaded with Dylan's experiences with alternate chapters covering the iPOD. Wish Dylan had a much wider coverage of the iPOD and kept his experiences to a bare minimum.

If you own an iPOD guess you should download the iPOD book and iPOD buyers guide from iLounge

Podcast

I was thrilled to get my first portable MP3 player - a 5G Apple iPod Video. I was in Colombo when the iPod arrived, sent across by a generous old colleague who's yet to collect the money. I have been told that several other players like iRiver, Creative Zen (http://www.cnet.com/) etc have the same capabilities as the iPod, but then the iPod does have real killer looks and a generous dose of snob value.

The iPod or any other portable digital media player is a fabulous device, besides listening to my favourite Jazz I can store photos, podcasts and video clips downloaded from You Tube. I can also put it to several other uses like use it as an external hard disk. All said its the podcast feature that really caught my attention. Its probably the best utility value you can get from any portable digital media player.

A podcast is a digital media file, usually in the MP3 format, distributed over the internet using syndicated feeds such as RSS and ATOM. In short people publish these media files so that they are available for download to anybody. A typical podcast is Ram Charan speaking on leadership available for download at the Harvard Business School Publishing (http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/). Adam Curry (http://www.dailysourcecode.com/), the video jockey on MTV was the first to create a podcast, strange as it may seem he is not the inventor of the podcasting technology, Kevin Marks a software engineer at Google was the contributor to the podcasting technologies like iPodder, now called Juice and available for download at Source Forge, which started the Podcasting revoution.

There are podcasts on every conceivable subject on the internet, Music being the most popular followed by Comedy, Podcasting, News etc. Apple’s itunes store is probably the best with its cool user interface. Other sites to download good podcasts are The Podcast Directory (http://www.podcast.net/); Yahoo Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com/); Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/); IndiePodder (http://www.indiepodder.org/) and GarageBand (http://www.garageband.com/). Most Podcasts are free and you’ll need a lot of space on your digital media player to accommodate all of them.

To subscribe and download podcasts you’ll need an aggregator like Juice and a media player. Some players like Apple’s iTunes have built in podcast features. Once you have this installed you can subscribe to several thousands of podcasts as they are published and these get downloaded invisibly onto your computer. You can then sync your media player to load these podcasts so that they are available to you when you are on the go. So how’s it different from any other audio file? Well the power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the feeds and as and when a new audio file is published the aggregator will download it for you. Imagine this. You have enrolled into a long distance learning program and you are expected to take 20 hours of lessons every week. Before the advent of internet you’ll have to wait for the post man to deliver the printed lessons. In the age of the internet you’ll have to wait for an email so that you can log-in to the univ’s site and listen to the audio files. In podcasting the aggregator regularly monitors the RSS feeds and downloads any recently published audio lessons.

To create a Professional quality Podcast you’ll need to record the audio in MP3 format using the software available from Garage Band (http://www.garageband.com/), Sound Forge’s Audio Studio or Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Having recorded your piece, You’ll have to then create an RSS feed that points to these files and publish it as a podcast on your website. A RSS file is an XML file with directions for aggregators. You can use MyRSSCreator (http://www.myrsscreator.com/) or Podcast RSS feed Generator (http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php) to create the RSS file. Use an FTP software like Mozilla FireFox’s extension FireFTP to upload the MP3 and RSS onto your server. Use an RSS validator like http://rss.scripting.com/ or http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your RSS and you are done. You’ll probably want to advertise your Podcast in the sites that I have mentioned above or to keep it simple email your friends telling them about the new craze that’s got onto you.
But then why would you want to create a podcast? You might be the professor in the long distance education program that I mentioned above; Your are a budding musician and have just recorded your first Ghazal and want to offer it to potential fans; You are a highly paid management guru, you just spoke at a seminar and your audience wants the complete recording of the speech; You are a techno lunatic, you want to tell the whole world on the conspiracy surrounding Indian Cricket or you just want to do it for fun, whatever maybe the reason Podcasting is the new broadcasting medium.

Celebration

Been busy on an interesting project, implementing our flagship product for one of the non-banking fianancial companies in India. Incidently these guys have partnered with the largest bank in South East Asia. After 120 days (and sleepless nights!) we transitioned to a production environment and achieved a"Go Live" on 15th May 2006. Champagne (admit it was sparkling wine!) and celebration followed that evening.

PMI - Certification Notification

There are changes in the qualification percentages for the PMP examination. Read the full text here

Current Reads - Sydney

Read this on a flight from Sydney to Singapore. Picked it up at Dymocks, Sydney.

A visit to Dymocks is a must if you happen to be in Sydney.

Some more on flock

Thought I should add this. I havent been able to get the favourite and the collections onto my del.icio.us account. Every time I click the "STAR" button I still find the "Your favourites" in my del.icio.us account empty.

If you already "STARRED" any URL's then there is no way you can get them into your del.icio.us account.

Flock has landed

Guess what, I blogged this directly from Flock. The new browser based on the Mozilla engine. I waited eagerly for over a month to try out this browser. Here's some of the features I find interesting.

1. Tagging favorites - Unlike in Firefox, you can add tags to your favourites so you can search for that URL you visited 6 months ago by keywords. Works for me because I have a huge collection of URLs and classiying them is a pain in firefox

2. Integration with Delicious - If you are using Firefox you'll need the Foxylicious extension to integrate your bookmarks with your delicious account. Flock has this feature inbuilt

3. History Search - Flock has a built in serach engine (Clucene - Open Source). Type a word or a phrase in the search box a menu drops down lisiting the matching results from the browser history. When you press "Enter" a normal web serach is done.

4. Multiple favourites - You can add a collection of URL's and these appear on a "spinner" control at the right hand corner of the favourites tool bar. Clicking this lists the Collections and allows you to choose tanyone of them. A nice addition for people like me who work on several projects during the week each requiring me to refer to different sources on the web. Obviously the favourites toolbar cannot accomodate all the URL so this is definitely a welcome feature. Wonder why nobody thought of it before.

5. RSS Reader - Doesnt work as intended. I created a collection of several feeds (Gantthead.com, news.google.com, oreilly.com. Every time I clicked the feed button in the collections flock displayed the aggregated page of the first feed only.

Flock didnt recognise the feed on http://www.expressindia.com

6. Integrated bogging - This post is a result of that feature!

7. Blog this - Highlight a piece of text on a webpage, right click and blog this! Yes it works and is that simple

8. The "Shelf" is like the scrap book extension available for firefox. You can drag stuff from web pages and drop them into the shelf (cant do that with scrap book). You can drag these stired items into your bolg post (if your using the blogging feature of flock).

9. Wasnt able to test the flickr integration. Flock asks for the username. I am not sure how its going to login to my flickr account without the password!

Top 500

Feedsters List of the top blogs.

Long time

Its been a month since I blogged. Whatever happened to good habits! Anyway I have done quite a few things - Became a member of PMI; At the helm of the project to obtain the BS7799 certification for my unit; a Data warehousing POC project; a software product development. That hardly leaves any time for other trivial pursuits like reading tompeters.com, emptying my mailbox on netscape.net, reading the PMI mailing list on Yahoo groups etc etc. I have hardly been doing any reading. But managed some time to go out to Geoffrey's at the Radha Park Inn!

Home at OpenSolaris




Solaris is now an Open Source operating System read about it at OpenSolaris.org

Why UML?

I have had some interesting questions from people from all walks of life, no just kidding, mainly from the software engineering community!

Why Should I use UML?

Well try writing a letter to somebody in English without using the English alphabet! Try replacing traffic signs with something else. Will it convey the intended meaning? Will you be able to capture what you intend to say in the first place? Every domain has a notation to capture and communicate people's intentions.

People use the English alphabet to construct words and phrases and convey their thoughts. Traffic signs on the other hand convey the signals (no pun intended) to motorists and pedestrians unambiguously. UML is the language to communicate the thoughts of a designer in OOAD. Such that other designers are able to decipher the design intentions without ambiguity. There is no substitute.

No amount of voluminous documentation can be a substitute for a well articulated UML diagram delivered in the petal file (.PTL / .MDL if you are using Rational Rose, Together J uses a different extension)

The advantages are enormous, for one componentisation and reusability is built in the design model so forward engineering it to any platform takes lesser time. That is you don't have to redo the initial phases of the project. Just continue from the design stage to the platform of your choice.

Two, You'll have a 360 degree view of your model rather than parts of it. However you can expose only certain portions of the design to your feature teams e.g. the data model can be exposed to the DBA.

Three, If you have hived off several portions of your application to different development locations (could also be teams, sub-contractors/vendors, countries) plumbing them together is rather simple.

Four, You can do away with all those voluminous design documents done on word processors. Saves a lot of time and hence money. They are ambiguous anyway because meaning of written words are prone to interpretation especially when things go wrong.

Five, Development is faster because programmers understand pictures better than the written word ( A picture is worth a hundred words! May not, may be its worth more than a thousand words or maybe its worth more than your entire design document!)

Your biggest advantage, your designs are unambiguous. Convey the same meaning to your entire development team no matter where they are located. Provided, they are literate in the unified modeling language!

While I write this, I have a great view of the fortune fountain, A stage is being erected for some sort of show right in the centre. Its dark but I can still people scampering with diagrams and blue prints (likely because something's being spread on the table and people are huddled over it) in their hands waving to each other while they erect the structures. Now just think how much would erecting a stage cost? A few thousand dollars? Does one have to go to such great lengths as to draw blue prints for a two hour show? Maybe, Maybe not. Now think about your next application that will cost you a few million dollars from inception to deployment. Which ideally should last a lifetime. Want to start building without a sound architecture?

Keep checking I'll be talking about how to get started on UML.

GTD Stuff I Picked Up

I picked up these cute stuff to help me GTD
1. Mitsuibishi Clipturn
2. Japanese colour paper
3. bookmark
4. Small Pad
5. Bodum press
6. Index Cards

Jazz Times

Picked these up from my favourite music store (HMV, Orchard Road & CityLink Mall)

Some Fiction!

Been reading some fiction. What else do you expect me to do while on the MRT.




With this I have read all the four novels of Dan Brown. Of them The Da Vinci Code is my favourite.

My artefacts

I am planning to put all my presentations on my site www.sridhar.in. (just in case you landed on this page directly!). A lot of assorted stuff on XP, Rose and UML, presentations from speaking assignments a lot of other project artefacts. It would probably be in PDF mainly because the web hosting service provider charges me a bomb for a little bit of space.

Design Document

I am sure as project managers we have had to review the design documentation of the architecture team. I have had several such design documents handed over to me for perusal each with a different layout, content , format etc Making me wonder arent all these stuff supposed to contain the system architecture in detail then why this difference?

Did you review any design documents? What do you look for? What do you expect it to contain? Do you expect any other artefacts other than just a document. Let me know.