Yeah, whatever

Abdominal Guards and population

2009-11-20T12:12:00.000-08:00

Some relations are just weird. I mean, I read it somewhere - the abdominal guards in cricket were first used in 1874. And helmets in 1974.
Also consider that India is very populous and also very cricket crazy. Well, some ppl think with different organs :) .

Subtle difference in access modifiers in java & ruby

2009-10-09T03:02:00.000-07:00

Just going through basics of Ruby and realized there is a slight difference in the behavior for protected and private access modifiers. From java to Ruby access modification differences are (other then syntax)
1. In Ruby default access to instance messages is public. In java the default method visibility is package.
2. In Ruby private access can be done only internal to the instance i.e. not even from other instance of the other class. In java that is allowed. Pretty much because in Ruby access determination happens at runtime.

Why Mayawati PM could be useful?

2009-04-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

A rather non technical /non managerial post.
I've met so many of my friends in India who dread the possibility that Mayawati could become prime minister of India. Why? What's so bad about it? Well, quiet a few things, she is ostensibly corrupt, biased and definitely does not believe in meritocracy (we are democracy any way:) ) , think of a disaster when she is on a world forum and just can not think strategically, an embarrassment. She will not understand what it takes to make sure India stays competitive in this world and we the citizens will lose out. well, there are many reasons indicating she is not the fit.
Here is one I think, why she could be a blessing, the first and foremost I believe she represents a large section of Indian population that just may realize a sense of power and may be start believing in Indian dream. Being a dreamer is a good thing, you need to be responsible and a believer in the rule of law to realize the dreams. Let's diverse and see what I mean?
Consider this, Indians take pride in their civilization, and believe in a bygone era when they were the knowledge centre of the world. At the same time, have a look at the technology, Indians claim they never attacked a country. May be, they couldn't? I may be wrong, but look at Indian sword or a bow and arrow, or a shield, all important accouterments of a soldier. Compare it, with invading army, e.g. Puru had a local advantage over Alexander, and in the battle they lost primarily because
1. The elephants, the Alexander's army attacked the trunks of elephants with spears and arrows, and elephants turned back and crushed their own army.(The elephants caused similar damage to another defending ruler in India against Babur)
2. They had heavy bows and due to the rains last night were not able to hold those properly.
Now think about it, Only people in the world who could tame elephants and use them with infantry lost due to those? On an elephant, u r on a height and if u have a long range archers sitting on elephants, its way too difficult for invading army to get closer to ur elephants and actually use spears against those.
We didn't posses long range weaponery. neither hardware nor skills. Imagine a middle age rajputana sword, compare it with chinese (Chinese BTW had different kinds of flame throwers, bows that could shoot multiple arrows and could be very quickly reloaded with magzines) , almost 6-7 different kind of swords for different styles.
Now why a huge population, that was rich,organized,excellent thinkers, knowledge seekers and also valiant warriors could not make relatively simpler technological upgrades?
could the reason be that a warrior (a kshtriya) who need to use the sword doesn't talk to the ironsmith (a lohar) who designes and creates it?
An innovation, be it a game changer (e.g. Internet) or simpler one ( a new code idiom) evolves when a lot of stakeholders collaborate, discuss, try, fail, try again and then a new winner comes along. It does not happen when those who understand physics and maths(Brahmins) does not see value in a technique that allows a lohaar to create a more lighter but powerful metal. Either the new technique won't evolve fully or nobody would suggest the man to use a better approach. Resulting into less innovation.
A cast system, that did not allow people to collaborate killed all that could be created only by matching and synthesizing new ideas between different actors.
I believe after a lot of years, a bigger section of the population trusts a leader, even when I abhor her. May be just may be, she give the confidence to these people to come out of their rut and try harder. May be, she realize in order to rule, the leader has to be responsible and honest.
She is street smart, sharp and just my bring a huge population to strive for education, better jobs, better techniques. Well, if she can make that section of India go for entrprise, we may ignore her obvious lack of english speaking abilities.

Xfire dependency of spring

2009-03-21T17:43:00.000-07:00

These days creation of webservices has become so easy and some times we just miss the pitfalls.
I just wanted to remember this, a very last entry in the manual and my eclipse xfire dependency just drops it.
Those who get this stupid error
"

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not find valid implementation for: 2.0

Spring 2.x support

Because of Spring 2.x new feature, services.xml default namespace must not be declared on the root element of configuration ( beans ) and need to be moved to tag level.

http://xfire.codehaus.org/services.xml+Reference

Job portal business model

2009-02-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

These days, I'm working for a company, that runs among other web properties a job portal. Now, I'm beginning to understand the business a bit. The business models/ biggest revenue driver is to sell database. Simple, create a good search mechanism around the database and sell it as value add to database sell. There are other business models too, but no revenues to write home about, e.g. some premium services to job seekers like touching up their resumes, provide prominence to these on people search and all, but not much. Historically, the premium service were the only revenue driver in India (Every job seeker needed to pay a fee for allowing businesses to easily access their resumes), but large requirements to hire good people in short span and some innovation from a start up changed all that.
As I understand, this requires a lot of branding effort to get job seekers to register on your portal and marketing/sales efforts to sell this registration data to recruitment consultants and employers.
This actually becomes a kind of chicken and egg problem, because the job seekers will register to your web property only if they find jobs that they want to apply to, and job providers will only buy database (and associated right to post jobs) only if they find job seekers, those they can contact and want to contact. And if you are in a upward spiral, you would need to be really stupid to stem the tide and god forbid, if you are on downward spiral or not number one and two in an over crowded market, no amount of marketing, telemarketing, e-mail marketing can create a sustainable cash flow (Good, I've started using some management jargon now ) . You stop your effort or limit it and you see a drop in new registration/old job seekers getting active again resulting into less job postings and activity from the job supply side (again).
Now, I don't know, may be,I'll ask our business people, why can't we create a google ad sense kind of business model.
I think it should go like this, similar to free job seeker registrations, database search and job posting is also free. Go ahead post the job for free and search as much as you like in the database, again for free. But 2 things change, we as service providers charge for service offered, i.e., if you want to contact a job seeker, we charge per mail/per phone call. If you want contact job seeker yourself, we charge a bit more and allow you to see the job seeker's contact details, available to you for next let's say 6 months after receiving a small payment. The payment is strictly pre payment. Every contact that you make and every application to your job ad or every impression that your job ad get or every click on your job ad, we charge a small amount. You exhaust your payment, re charge. You may define your limits per posting, we don't mind. You may define, if you want your ad to be e-mail marketed or telemarketed or not.
Can we have a long tail then?

Jboss 5 classloading interesting

2009-01-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

Very recently I started running a web application(previously on websphere 5) on Jboss 5 general release with JDK 6 on a Ubuntu box.
Really didn't had much to change except adding one jboss-web.xml, to set the context root. But it's a legacy application which has plethora of jar files in its webinf/lib file. What bugged me for about 2 hrs was this, on a Servlet filter the cast from ServletRequest to HttpServletRequest failed. I tried introspecting the request object in the filter code with the following code
logger.debug(getClass().getName());
logger.debug((req instanceof javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest));
for(int i =0; i < req.getClass().getInterfaces().length;i++){
logger.debug((req.getClass().getInterfaces()[i]).getName());
}
javax.servlet.http.HttpSession session=(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest)req).getSession(true);
And the log statement in the for loop was displaying "javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest " and debug statement in line 2 was "false". And the last line was giving a ClassCastException.
Intially surprised then upon digging deeper realized it's a stupidity on my end and different classloading at Jboss.
I had a servlet-api.jar in my webinf/lib. I think JBoss loaded HttpServletRequest, it loaded from it's own classloader. While in the application a child classloader loads another instance of this "Class" object from the webinf lib. In the application code the last line compared 2 different class objects loaded by different class loaders, the request object was from Jboss classloader and the other one was from application classloader and gave the error.
Some insight that I had forever but took 2 hours to fix :).
The fix was to remove the servlet-api.jar from webinf lib.

Management in technology - Joel Spolsky

2008-01-22T08:06:00.000-08:00

Management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done.
Go to Joel's blog and read Talk at Yale part 2. :)

Outsourced IT development Differentiator

2007-12-20T23:32:00.000-08:00

Just musing if I'm a CTO/Start-up or a business owner, looking to outsource some/all of my technical effort. How should I go about it? What is it that helps me in deciding where to go, whom to entrust such a critical piece of my business?
On a Weblog, They suggest what to do in contract to make it legally binding, but not much on how to decide. A lot of literature is also there, to tell you, when or what to outsource, but whom to? Forrester and other such market research organization continue to publish studies that tell you that this business is close to several billions, and still increasing. Still, very few guidelines on how to select a IT vendor. Now, vendor selection as process is beaten to death, but in this case the (new development) success rate is abysmally low. I mean what data I should seek from a vendor to evaluate their maturity, is it instincts based, is it subjective and only experienced veteran can make a good decision? Now, don't get me wrong, I understand that "it depends", essentially on ,what I'm looking for. But why should I choose TCS over Infosys or vice versa. is it only cost arbitration?
Ok, let me look from the vendor eyes, If I'm CEO of a outsourced company what should I do to differentiate my company from the others. A differentiation that is solid, covers a broader spectrum and is obvious. A differentiation that let's me charge a premium on my services.
It could be a niche, which is ok, but in these days of open source, Internet a long term niche is hard to maintain, more over if this is a new niche, it'll take a lot of time in educating the market.
Let me ask this again, what could be the next disruptive thing that can change this market.
If I'm a US based company then how do I compete with outsourcing destinations in India,China and others. What I could do that is hard to emulate and gives me long term scalability?
huf ...., too many questions or is it only one?

Tell me how u measure them and I'll tell u how do they behave.

2007-08-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

Very Old saying, isn't it??
Essentially measurement is the first step in defining goals, and sometimes the most important one.
Think about it, we measure distances in miles/km and a lot of transportation is measured in 2 paradigms
1. No. of KM a thing need to travel.
2. Weight
if somebody adds the time as part of the measurement, wouldn't that be great. Actually a lot of courier companies just did that and they charge a premium for it.(i.e. they take less time).

Being a software professional, I was thinking how do we measure people. Let me ask a more generic question,why do we want a performance measurement.
I mean if I work in a software production factory(I don't believe its anything else), how to reward people for good work and how to define good work.
I think a measurement should do the following
1. Tell the shareholders how the company is doing.(I think that is related to earnings?)
2. Tell a customer how well people in a company do there job?
3. Tell a COO /CEO (whatever) how is various units/deptt. doing and what he needs to do to improve/fix things.
4.Tell managers how teams are doing.
5. Tell team leaders how members are doing.
6. Tell individuals how these guys are doing.
Essentially quiet a few of these questions are answered in what is called Performance Management Systems.
At the higher management a lot of time is spend in deciding what a PMS should do. And after 10 years in Software Industry I think at the developer/individual level this is what we measure.
1. Analytical Abilities
2. Leadership qualities
3. Knowledge
4. Performance
and some other things. Normally these are measured on the basis of indirect weightage being given as answers to different questions.
After measurement overall numbers are normalized and whole company is divided into groups of V.Good, Good, bad etc.
Now, if we look at the criteria most of those are subjective and based upon the perception of the appraiser. If the measurement is based upon the "Perception is reality" , I think this isn't hard to guess how people will behave.
A lot of people will make sure that they stay in good books of the appraisers.
So let me understand that, most of the normalized curves in IT industry are biased towards people being good. May be 10-20 % V. Good, 60-70% good and 10-20% bad. Wow, so, We work with good people.
Let's consider another axiom of Software Industry.
"60-70% projects fail", because of different reasons.
What !!, 60-70% people executing projects are good, but 60-70% projects fail.
Why would that be? Could measurement be one of the reasons?
Will dwell upon it in further posts.

A story

2006-08-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

A little longer, but I think its funny.

Let me tell a story. A story about computer application class, their teacher, a campus recruiter and a testing tool :) .

Now Disclaimer “To suit the story I may mold some principals and it may resemble a little realistic, but it’s imaginary” (yeah, believe that and you’d believe vaccinations are bad for health).

Any way a campus recruiter distributed students of this class in different teams and gave all teams same problem to solve. Time 3 hours (as decided by all) and Teacher wrote this problem in bold on the board.

“Give an implementation of a Fibonaaci series in Java”.

Team X googled fibonaaci and started working on the program.

Team Y also googled and then went back to teacher to verify the problem. These being favorite team of teacher (any guesses why??), he explained to them that problem is to give implementation of a fibonacci series and not The Fibonaaci series.

Team Z had no clue of the problem so, teacher patiently explained, A fibonaaci series is a series where the Nth term is sum of previous 2 term. The implementation is to provide 2 functions, first to give Nth terms given initial 2 terms and value of N. Second is to offer sum up to N terms.

Still, Team W had no clue(these will not be recruited) and teacher told them that they could write a loop from 0 to N, with 2 or 3 variables they could write a function that could do both, or better still functions could be written separately.

Still, some of team members were not happy with the clarity but that’s life.

90 minutes later

Now I’m reinitializing the team names because I with my limited creativity am running out of names.

Team “mere programmer” started working on a java class, they created a program that assumed only one parameter as input, assumed 1^st 2 variables were 0,1 and created a function.

Team “process programmers” did the same thing, but they wanted to avoid review comments so, they made initial parameter constants.

Team “senior process programmers” had a lot of knowledge of GoF and J2EE patterns so, they started with 3 layers and started writing a data layer that read initial parameters from database and computed the sum.

Team “Geek” actually wrote 3 functions

getNextTerm(1^st term,2^nd term) ,

getNthTerm(N, 1^st term,2^nd term) called function above to get to nth term,

and calcSum(N,1^st term,2^nd term) and used functions above.

Then one portion of the team first created some unit tests for all 3 functions and started writing their java class.

Looking at geeks teacher asked everybody to write Unit tests.

Programmers wrote only one, it was good enough.

Process Programmer didn’t like it but wrote one.

Senior process programmer got resentful and said it should have been told earlier as now they require a running database to run unit tests and it could not be done.

Now the fun begins :)

Recruiter in the meanwhile understanding the credo of the institute for “automation” downloaded a testing tool of java. This tool was good, it generated random initial parameters but to test fibonaaci implementation it required the API provider to stick to an interface. Teacher and students cried loud that it should have been told earlier. Recruiter responded that although he expected teams to be agile but considering the situation (he is stuck with class as he could not go to another institute just like that), he offered 15 more minutes. Although by now teacher realized his own mistake of not realizing the need of interface earlier, admitted his mistake. He requested 45 more minutes in good faith and apologized for his mistake. Everybody haggled and teams got 30 minutes finally.

160 minutes later

Geeks changed their code, wrote an interface and Adapter (googled GoF) and were almost ready.

Everybody else was re-writing their program. But data layer, constants (these in itself are not bad, actually very good, but should be used when required, says Eric a.k.a. GoF) were still there. It may sound weird but senior programmers in order to implement interface were fixing their data layer to insert parameters in database. Mere programmers and others were doing what they did best, copying seniors. :)

Looking at this, Recruiter downloaded another version of tool that generated random parameters and dumped those in a database.

He told this to class :) and teacher. And it started chaos again. Teacher got dissatisfied with recruiter, recruiter (since he did it to help teams) thought teams were bad, and Geeks were thinking now how to incorporate this.

Everybody started haggling again and finally class got 30 more minutes to incorporate changes. Teacher and Recruiter were worried, the whole thing was going over budget. They had allocated the infrastructure for 4.5 hours only. Beyond this could mean stiff penalty for teacher. Students were to go to another campus after 5 hours (Mere programmers knew this and rejoiced at it). Recruiter didn’t want to lose good students and was worried.

210 minutes later

Geeks had written a controller, implementing the same interface (they googled GoF and figured out a factory and decorator) which picked up the parameters from database (copied that code from seniors) and called their original java class. Geek tested their controller manually.

Seniors dropped their insertion code and were testing their class.

Rest copied seniors.

215 minutes

Testing tool had a bug. Both versions had the same bug. Some time it did not generate all the parameters and sometime it generated value of parameters so large that it crashed the hardware.

Now recruiter was very worried, so was teacher. Seniors were angry at them, but actually happy with themselves as their program was throwing (no not Null Pointer), but IllegalArgument (process helps :)). Geeks looked at their code, wrote a parameter valuator, wrote unit tests for that and created logical default for every wrong parameter (e.g. Nmax = 1000) .Offered default values via a capability interface as well.

230 Minutes

Geeks could handle this. Seniors could as well but they were now beginning to think and appreciate geeks. Rest had no idea what was going on.

250 minutes

Everybody had their program but only Geeks were offered job .Now, I tell you a secret, recruiter was working for a freshly funded start up company that offered loads but needed the best (Some how I think every story should have a happy ending, don't know why).
Seniors got their offers based upon an interview in the next round, but not that great salary. Rests of students were recruited by big U.D.T and are going through fresher’s training.

The End

Replace teacher with your project manager/architect/leader, replace recruiter with your customer/partner and replace tool with the market and you'd know what I'm talking about.

Now the crib

I am perhaps somewhere in between process and senior group but boy I’d give my arm and a leg to become a geek. I’m worried about seniors though; these are sincere people and work most. They should not be angry and feel frustrated.

And what do you think about Team X, Y, Z, and W. Team X is risk, they might be genius but it may be a disaster as well. And Team Z and W! do everybody like them. Wow, I don’t.

Well, that’s it, I hope I clarified few things, but if I didn’t, remember vaccinations are vicious marketing campaigns of multinational giant pharma companies.

Appreciation

2006-03-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

These days we all are getting the appreciation mails :) . And this gets better and better. People are getting appreciation for doing their standard job. And being happy about it.
This may be motivating for whole lot of people but some how I find it funny. Appreciation for anything seems like taking away the value. I'd like my contribution to be acknowledged and thats all. Not really made out an example for anything.
The doing of a job gives me pleasure. A work well done, I don't need appreciation for it. I already know if I did a good or bad job.
Do I need appreciation for things I just did, w/o my heart in it? More pertinent question, why did I even do it?
Primarily appreciation/acknowledgment is motivating only when it comes from people I respect and I anyway know I did a good job according to my standards. Now, an appreciation w/o a definition of standards is truly limiting.

Salary is low

2006-03-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Why do we continue to crib about low salary? Is it low? OR it is low in comparison to everybody else?
Can I make my ends meet and save some for my 100 K? Yeah, I can and I don't want to compare my salary with equivalent profiles (it is low actually :) ). Should it affect me? I don't think so.
Two people are never same, some just negotiated better, some passed out from IIT etc.These will be rewarded no matter what.
Ok, let me ask a more pertinent question. Will I leave if I get a 20% raise from the competitor company? No, I don't think so.
I may leave because of following reasons
1. My colleagues think they are too smart and can go back to their stated commitments (verbal , so what) and then write mails like -"hey Gagan, I think there is a disconnect here, What I said was not this(whatever) but blah, blah ....." .
2. How many times I'm disturbed from doing what I like doing. At my place if I'm reading a book I'm not disturbed, but in office on an average I spend 30% of my day in meetings :) . Truly hateful. I'd prefer keeping a day aside for status, skip, and other management meetings, just don't be there everyday.

What to do with life

2006-02-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

Few things, wasting my time on.
In the nutshell how do I answer "what do I want to do with my life?" .Truthfully, nothing, just allow me to read books, sleep a lot and generally allow me to be a bum. But nobody accept this answer. Essentially they say, I should do only what I want to do but "what I want to do" should be a secure choice and ultimately should lead to a paycheck :) . Too bad but I want to be a bum, thats it.
Alright, let's explore this further, I agree that I should do what I truly, sincerely believe in, what I'm good at, time loses its meaning when I'm doing it and once I go for the smoke after indulging in it and I enjoy that too. wow, lets decide/discover that. Let's give it a 'Dil Chahta hai' test for 2 minutes.
zzz.......
Alright 2 minutes are over, and do I know what I want to do? Boom, still I want to be a bum.
Now we can explore this decide/discover part a little later, or perhaps in another post.
Here is how I want to go about it.
Let's go with needs an desires -:)
What I desire is a bungalow with a private beach and a hill resort cottage, good food (read Lebanese), good wine(read not too fancy but good red wine ) :) and be a bum. About 100 millions $ -:)

What I need is a monthly pay rent,some budget to buy books, surf net and standard Dal,Roti.About 100,000 $ :)
Ok, I can start being a bum pretty early i.e. when I have 100k invested, isn't it? I don't have to get a paycheck necessarily to be a bum . I can be little more responsible, a little more patient till I make 100K. After that I'll be responsible/patient only for those who don't stop me(actually only those who help me) being a bum.
Wait a minute, this gives me little insight in my CEO's behaviour, how come he is so patient with me, I'm not great conversationalist, I don't do engaging conversation, I'm more of a blunt guy but he is still paitent with me. Only 2 reasons
1. I help him doing something he truly likes
2. He is making his 100K (Whatever that may be)