Month: May 2008

Getting challenging projects done

All of us have been in these situations, where we have fought for a challenging project to be assigned to us. Now, we have it for ourselves. Hmm. Now what? How do we start? It slowly sinks into you that it is indeed a very challenging project, for a short time line. Some of us start feeling jittery even.
Lifedev.net has a great writeup, for just this sort of situation. Read on here.

The essence of the article is:

  1. Start small
  2. Make small timelines
  3. Frequently review the details
  4. Don’t sweat the details… yet.
  5. Think outside the box
  6. Think INSIDE the box
  7. Ask advice

Each one of these bullets is important – ones that we often tend to ignore in high-pressure situations.

Setting a clear type font for your cmd window on XP

If you are like me, and you use the cmd window (or the MKS Korn Shell window, or the Cygwin window, or any other command line interface), you might be interested in this. If you had noticed earlier, these terminals had very limited font changing support. You could either change it to Lucida or to Raster. Both of them are definitely not the best. Microsoft recently released a set of clear type fonts, which are much much easier on the eyes, and look a whole lot better than the clunky lucida.

(click on image to see full size. The clear type effect is best seen when you see it full size)

If you want your terminals to look like the above, jump to this link to get a step-by-step tut on how to get this done. I did this just now, and it works like a dream.

Update: One of uses of this blog is to put some of the esoteric tricks that I find here, so that I can refer them later. Today was my day of reckoning. I wanted to add my new fav font “Monaco” to the mks bash font listing. So all I did was search my blog, and voila. One thing that I would do is to put in a screen shot here.

Go to start-run-regedit. Then open up HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> software -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> Console -> TrueTypeFont. Then right-click -> new -> string value. Add ‘000’ as the key and the new font name as the value.

monaco1

Shifted backside, imported crackery and Brocheva revarura …

What do these have in common? All part of a bus ride back home from ITPL 🙂

The shifted backside was not incurred by me, because of the bad road – but happened to be a sign put up by a shopkeeper to indicate that he has vacated his older shop facing the road, and moved to a shop at the back.

The imported crackery was not any drug case busted, but happened to be a sale on airport road, selling plates, spoons and other dinner sets. (I think the owner meant crockery!)

And as for ‘Brocheva‘, the driver had a small AM radio and a speaker above his head, which he had tuned to All India Radio Vividh Bharathi. It has been so long since I listened to this. And yesterday, it was Unni Krishnan crooning to Brocheva in Kamas, and Paluke Bangara mayena in Ananda Bhairavi. The driver was fully into the music. He was tapping his foot, putting thalam on the steering wheel, and was totally enjoying a full-blown music sabha experience. Only that, his driving speed or his rashness did not reduce, because of the mellifluous music.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6FIwW-qWGQ&hl=en]

Incidentally, Paluke is a briilliantly addictive song. I am still humming it.

Hans Rosling and his data

Wow. Just watch this TED-talks talk by Hans Rosling. Amazing presentation of complicated data. Everyone will understand this.

[click here to see the talk. It is 20 minutes. but well worth the time]

I cannot really describe this presentation as it would not give due credit. In presenter-extra-ordinaire Garr Reynold’s words, the talk is introduced as:


Hans Rosling, an expert in public health from Sweden, does an amazing job in this presentation bringing the data to life. If you want to know how he did all those graphics, go to gapminder.org. It’s all there. Hans is saying the problem is not the data, the data is there. But it’s not accessible to most people for three reasons: (1) For researchers and journalists, teachers, etc. it is too expensive. (2) For the media it is too difficult to access. (3) For the public, students, and policy makers, it is presented in a boring way. His solution is to make the data free, let it evoke and provoke an “aha” experience,” or a “wow!” experience for the public. I loved the way he got involved with the data, virtually throwing himself into the screen. He got his point across, no question about it.

I found this through Garr’s site presentationzen.com. And if you want to know what Garr means, when he says, he loved the way that Hans threw himself on the day, look below.

Wipro factory ?

I have always made fun of the large software houses like Wipro, TCS, Infosys in Bangalore (in good jest). I have nothing against them. They are giving more than their fair share to the GDP of the nation, and I admire that. But I always make fun of them, by calling them code factories, where thousands of engineers write code-after-code, for offshore clients. I have heard inhumane conditions of work — not physically, but conditions of work, where creativity is stymied, and routine work is admired, and gains you a promotion etc. In these factories, there are all but a few people who decide the specs, and what goes where, and the others code, code, and code … Readers who work there, please do not take offense. I am not saying these are menial jobs. It requires expertise and good software engineering skills.

Anyways, coming to the point of the post, yesterday, in one of the Wipro buses, I found this slogan. I may be missing a few words here and there, but the gist went like this:

Wipro — Innovation at its best … etc etc … We follow the factory model, resulting in 30% lesser defects and higher quality software products.

I was floored. Wow. They really follow some factory model ! Very interesting. And I went and looked up on wikipedia to see what the factory model is, and sure enough, there is something called the software factory.

And guess what, I even found the following paper in IEEE through google.

A Software Factory Model Based on ISO9000 and CMM for Chinese Small Organizations

Very interesting.

Deccan chronicle … smrtr ? fastr ? lessr?

(pic: sans serif -> Karnataka Photo News)

Whats up with Deccan chronicle and its stinginess for words. The ads are all over Bangalore. Apparently they use lesser words and more news. And hence they are fastr to read? And you can read the paper fastr? The next thing they will be doing is to write in the new fangled SMS English (or are they already doing that ?). Imagine a serious news being written in that lingo. This is how it would look like.

AIIMS gets doc bk

New Delhi: Centr on Thu suffrd a setbk with the Suprm Crt strkng dn the AIIMS and PIMER(A)A and restrng P. Venugopal as AIIMS Drctr. 🙂

(or)

V will tame infl : PM

PM M.Singh on Thu promisd that the UPA govt led by the Cong would tame infl in coming months and roll back infl rate to reasonable levels. ;-0

Hmm. Cannot imagine reading news like that. Whatever will the austere kaapi drinking I-cannot-see-the-light-of-day-without-reading-Hindu mafia in Chennai do?

News burst about Yahoo and Microsoft

(pic courtesy: cnet:news.com)

Everyone has heard about the proposed take over of Yahoo by Microsoft. Their repeated increase of their offer price, and Yahoo not giving in. Lots of people predicted yahoo shareholders would be upset, and newspapers reported that Yahoo stock plunged – because they did not take what seemed to be a good offer etc. But did anyone do an accurate calculation, like what Kottke did ?

On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion. In still other words, in attempting to take Yahoo by force, they let an amount equal to Yahoo slip through their fingers. Why isn’t anyone writing about Yahoo’s amazing stock gains and Microsoft’s plunge?

If everyone did, the whole concept of media sensationalism would die ! (and I sure wish it did, after the unfortunate incident of me watching Headline news the other day!)