Arjun Ram

I turned 27 yesterday .. Darn! starting to feel like a old fart already The last year has been pretty descent. Had a stable job, started a
weblog and paid off my loans I hope this year brings progress, peace
and some exciting stuff. Enough said, time for execution!

Robert scoble has spoken my mind when he writes about why he keeps blogging.

Why do I keep posting? Because I have found no other way to meet as many geeks, see as much technology, have as many interesting conversations with interesting people, and make things happen for so many people, as my blog.

3) It lets you reward others. Do you know the social power of a link? I’ve had people come up to me at conferences all giddy saying “do you realize what happened after you linked to me?” Certainly I’m aware of the GooglePower that I send someone when I link to them. But it’s more than that. I’ve made powerful friends after I’ve linked to them. It’s a social thing. Dave Sifry, the guy who founded Technorati, is right. It’s a social gesture. (Personal bloggers, it’s a far more powerful act of friendship to link to someone on your blog than it is to say “that guy’s my friend” in Google’s Orkut).

4) It lets you have conversations. One thing I’d say to Chris is to put “OneNote” and “Pratley” into Feedster.com and subscribe to those two feeds. Then, when someone says something about OneNote or Pratley, respond. By showing you care about people’s opinions, they are far more likely to give you feedback that’ll make your product better. (Personal bloggers, if you respond to people who talk about you, you’ll find you build real and lasting friendships).

I have learnt some much out of these conversations, blogs sharpen my brain and keeps it working rather than staying idle & I realise one more thing today, folks like russell beattie & robert scoble have successful blogs because they articulate extremely well even while the link. It just not about what they link or write its about how they articulate. Wonder if they are as good in person..

I got back to the code that we launched to production a few weeks back
to tie up some looses and sync up with the screwed up PVCS. Having been
pulled to work on other stuff, I felt like I was looking at my code
with a new pair of eyes and to give a perfect analogy of how I felt
seeing my code

“One designs & develops for a few months & after all the mad
rush, You let the code (muddy water) settle down untouched for a few
weeks. First look at the code feels like one has the muddy water, but
when you get back to look at your code again it feels like the mud has
settled down and the water is floating on top waiting to be drained out!

I feel like its a perfect time to learn the mistakes & the good
things out of the project and to improvise the rough edges. This is
probably the best time for a lot of Aha moments from design/code point
of view.

I have learnt 2 lessons that I wanna put out there

• Divert attention after a release and work on something else (let
  the mud settle) before taking a look at the code again. This would add
  much more value & help one build better software.
• This break is also generally need to schedule a code review.

What is Fat Tuesday?
Fat Tuesday is Mardi Gras, the festival New Orleans, Louisiana, is famous for. “Gras” is French for fat and “Mardi” is French for Tuesday.

The annual festivities start on January 6, the Twelfth Night Feast of the Epiphany, when the three kings are supposed to have visited the Christ Child, and build to a climax on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which always occurs on the day before Ash Wednesday. The parties and parades will continue until Lent begins at the stroke of midnight on Tuesday.

Mardi Gras is a legal holiday in New Orleans. It is scheduled to occur 46 days before Easter. Since the actual date Easter occurs on changes yearly, Mardi Gras can happen on any Tuesday between February 3 and March 9.

For two centuries it has been an annual event in New Orleans, except during the two World Wars.

Mardi Gras’ Catholic Roots

People seem to address it as fat tuesday in the midwest. Havent heard the term used so popularly when I was in connecticut or may be I was not so domesticated

I decided to try Flaming Lips album “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” after reading Russell beattie’s comment on the album. Really good to play the album at work or while you are on the road. Make sure you try it out.

EETimes provides a detail description of how the problem with the rovers was created/solved:

“Part of my responsibility in the data management team is to keep track of the data files that are created, transmitted and deleted on the rover during the mission,” Klemm explained. “We recognized early in the planning process that the flash file system had a limited capacity for files. It is not just a limitation in the flash itself but also in the directory structure.”

As Murphy would have it, earlier, sol 19 Spirit attempted to allocate more files than the RAM-based directory structure could accommodate. That caused an exception, which caused the task that had attempted the allocation to be suspended. That in turn led to a reboot, which attempted to mount the flash file system. But the utility software was unable to allocate enough memory for the directory structure in RAM, causing it to terminate, and so on.

“The irony of it was that the operating system was doing exactly what we’d told it to do,” Klemm lamented.Working on the theory that the rover was in fact listening and rebooting, the team commanded Spirit to reboot without mounting the flash file system.

Having worked on Vxworks for a while, remote debugging can painful and fustrating, but when one does get a hold on the problem its very rewarding. Requires lots of patience & energy to relentlessly try and fix the problem. Im glad they fix the problem

Dave has put up his presentation on Roller.

Slides from the Roller talk.

I sent them to TriJUG last night. Until they post, I’ll host the presentation here: RollerTalk-TriJUG-2004.ppt

Gives a very good overview of the Blogging landscape and will be useful to anyone writing a J2EE application. Check it out. Nicely done Dave!

Ran into JavaPractices when I was searching something else. Seems to be pretty descent.

Matt & some commentors on his thread have raised some interesting points/questions. Instead of responding there, I decided to post an entry here.

Matt,
     A little bit of history. Mainsoft the company that does Visual Mainwin used to be my previous employer’s (www.bristol.com) competitor. Both our companies helped customers port their VC++ code to UNIX environments. Both the companies licensed Microsoft source code and ported it to unix & provided tools to support the porting. Microsoft created this market expecting UNIX developers to start coding using VC++(Mainsoft even ported Visual Studio – Visual Mainwin) and migrate to windows. At this point in time UNIX beat windows (4.X NT at the time) hands down in terms of stability, performace etc. What ended up happening was, Companies started porting to their code to UNIX environments. Microsoft decided to kill the market by stopping the licensing of their source code (WISE agreement). Meanwhile this market died when most companies decided to move from thick clients to thin clients. Mainsoft has decided come up with a bridge to support .NET applications on J2EE. 2 important questions have been raised.

Visual Studio as a development environment: Having worked on both environments extensively I would rank Visual Studio as a better environment when compared to Eclipse. Eclipse is getting there but it still misses some intutive stuff that Visual Studio provides. You got to give that microsoft. They are good at building tools and simplifying the GUI. The point in question here is that would people using Visual Mainwin to write their java code? I DONT think so. Explaination later.

Porting .NET code to Java: This is viable market and a viable solution! As Webservices & standards start to mature this would become a reality. Im betting that Windows forms is going to be much better than the corresponding Java Solutions. Microsoft has extensive experience developing UI/GUI applications/tools/environments while SUN/Java is still learning the ropes.

While working with my previous employer, we found that customers wanted to stick their development environments but wanted tools/plugins within that environment to support the porting/migration. For example someone like you would want to stick to eclipse and develop your code. Also if the teams are bigger which is the case in most corporations, you are going to have 2 teams one to develop J2EE components/code and one to develop .NET code (Unless they find many dominic’s ).

Bottom line: Mainsoft Binary compiler & it related tools would be a good fit while Visual Mainwin might not be a hit!

P.S: I speak for myself and no one else!