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February 20 New mobile hotmail websiteI have been a hotmail user for more than 10 years now. My first email account was actually a mailcity.com account which later became lycos.com. Not many people know about this but there is a mobile version of hotmail website which was specifically designed for small screens and cHTML/xHTML compliant browsers. Since iPhone came out, hotmail users have been asking for a mobile site which would better utilize the capabilities of new generation mobile browsers such as mobile Safari, Opera, Nokia Series 60 devices and future Windows phones. Anyways, over the last eight months my team worked on building the new version of mobile hotmail website and now I am happy to say that it is available to all hotmail users :) Note:liveside.net now has an article about this: http://liveside.net/main/archive/2009/02/22/introducing-the-new-windows-live-hotmail-mobile-beta.aspx
July 28 Being a crowd member in an Indian reality show Interesting article focusing on member of "crowd" in Indian reality shows. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/28/AR2008012802442.html Aparently the female fan who kissed Aditya Narayan on SRGMP 2007 was paid $25 extra for doing that. Her engagement was called off by the groom when he saw the show on TV :) If you see the following clip you will notice at the end that the girl isn't really happy about it and it is pretty obvious that the whole thing was staged. July 01 Google vs MS - from an ex-employee's eyes Interesting Google vs MS culture comparison. Unlike many others this guy has been MS as well as Google employee in the past. http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008/06/back-to-microsoft.html June 29 Best wedding dance everThis is the best wedding video I have ever seen. Two minutes into the video and the groom completely takes control of the dance floor. I think he is one-up on his bride when it comes to dance steps :) June 24 Spicy stir fry served over pasta in an Italian restaurant - really tastyI didn't expect to find Stir fry vegetables on the menu in an Italian restaurant in Dublin. And to my surprise it was really yummy. I am definitely going there again before heading back to Seattle :) June 17 Perf tuningWright has a cool analogy for software performance tuning and also simple suggestions - not your run of the mill ProfileIt, CacheIt...
April 23 Technology versus common senseBus driver decided to ignore flashing lights and warning signs and instead relied on GPS unit in the bus. End result - He tried to force his 12 feet high vehicle through a 9 foot bridge. Good thing is that no one was hurt. I am pretty sure they will try to sue the GPS company for this :)
PS: It was brought to my attention that GPS related accidents aren't that uncommon. Check this out March 04 Software testing HelpI came across this interesting website about software testing. There is probably nothing new for veterans in QA team but its definitely a good FAQ for developers and also for new test teams who don't have a lot of experience February 27 Software quality decays one check-in at a time...Today someone at work mentioned a famous quote from Albert Einstein: "We can never solve our significant problems from the same level of thinking we were at when we created the problems".
I think it is especially true when it comes to software development. Developers love to criticize legacy code. I am probably one of them :) What I am intrigued by is that given an opportunity many devs tend to make the same mistakes again. Example: If version 1.0 of your product suffered from extensive coupling to other components then isn't it obvious that when you start working on version 2.0 of the product you will try to encapsulate interfaces and reduce coupling?
Since there has been some interest around this particular blog I will elaborate some more. I obviously can't use real examples :) Say you have a product called ServerProduct which uses components Foo and Bar. When ServerProduct was implemented there were many constraints (time, dev experience on team etc) and hence components Foo and Bar ended up being tightly coupled in ServerProduct. Later many issues were found in ServerProduct. Most of those issues were tracked back to Foo and Bar. But because Foo and Bar were so tightly coupled in ServerProduct, it was literally impossible to replace either Foo or Bar. ServerProduct was called a legacy product and every one hated it. Fast forward to today. After a lot of convincing everyone agreed to rewrite ServerProduct using new versions of Foo and Bar so that all issues get resolved once for all :) When it comes to implementation, the new set of devs couple new version of Foo and Bar with the new version of ServerProduct. Most of old problems get resolved but just as it happened with ServerProduct 1.0, new set of problems will be discovered eventually... This is what makes me wonder, if coupling was the source of first set of problems then shouldn't it be avoided the next time? February 18 MyNetflixI came across this cool Netflix plugin for Windows Media Center. Still in beta but allows you to add movies to your Netflix queue and also watch movies online. Definitely worth a try if you are Windows user and Netflix subscriber. February 17 vTapIf you have unlimited data plan for your cellphone and you want to watch online videos for killing time then vTap is exactly what you need. Installation is pretty straight forward and the interface is surprisingly intuitive. Since it is a rich client, it allows you to start typing and keeps retrieving results as your search query expands.
It searches across YouTube, Google Video, MSN Videos and many more video sites. Give it a try and you will be hooked just like me :) February 10 Xperia X1Windows mobile phone with VGA (800 x 480) touchscreen display. I want one of these... January 10 Yahoo Messenger for Vista...WOW !!!I recently saw the new Yahoo Messenger demo for vista. If you haven't seen this, I highly recommend you check it out. Yahoo has done a good job of showcasing some of the features offered by Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) which comes standard with Vista. WPF looks very promising and I can't wait to see a bunch of new and creative user interfaces developed using WPF. Yahoo Messenger is just a beginning. The "Wow" definitely starts now. Wonder how long we will have to wait till WLMessenger starts using WPF... January 04 Starbucks @ workPleasant surprise for me when I got to work after 3 weeks of vacation...Starbucks machine...wohooo :) Much better than what we had in the past.
Now only if it could be remotely programmed...so by the time I leave my desk and walk to the kitchen it would have my favorite drink ready...that would have been real nice :)
There are no LAN ports on these machines so I guess it wont be possible in this version. December 25 Vacation is over...almostNo matter how much one enjoys working, nothing beats being on vacation. My three week trip to India is almost over. We will be flying back to Seattle on Wednesday and I start working on Thursday. Can't wait for the next vacation :( |
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