Off to Manali

Its been 3 good months in Bangalore. Its been fascinating working on Must See India and there has been great progress to keep the enthu going. For one, the traffic on Must See India has doubled in these 3 months! But the real motivation is the encouraging comments for travel enthusiasts that keep on flowing.

Other happenings in these 3 months have been Tennis, trip to Coonoor, two trips to Chennai and a rediscovered interest in photography. Traveling with some great photographers to Coonoor gave me motivation to get better pictures from my camera and I have been working towards learning the manual modes of my Canon Powershot S3 IS. The best of the pictures that I have taken all go in this Must See Photo Album.

After a real busy past 2 weeks, its time to take a break and do what I like the most - travel! Leaving for Delhi today, and then to Manali. The primary agenda is gonna be Paragliding at Solang Valley. And its gonna be a 5 day course where we should (hopefully) be able to paraglide all by ourselves.

So here I go, wishing everyone Happy Dusshera and a prosperous Diwali in this festive month.

6 years of software engineering

This is probably going to be the shortest review so far. I have already talked about my new venture a while back. Life has not been the same ever since. I always thought of life as a series of challenges. You solve one, you get another. The level keeps on increasing. Its almost like playing a game. I am pretty satisfied with the way I completed the previous level, and what gives me extra satisfaction is the 2 statements my previous company's GM made when I was about to leave:

• You have very high professional ethics, and such people succeed in the long run.
• You have followed one of the most complete career paths in this company.

That level is over, and its time to play up the highest professional challenge.

On the personal side, life continues to be a roller coaster. I remember that long long time ago (before I even started this blog), I took an EQ (Emotional Quotient) test. In the results, they said that I fell into the same category as Albert Einstein did. Before I could feel proud, I read the next line which said - Albert Einstein had 3 broken marriages.

5 years of software engineering

Time for the yearly review. This got delayed this time around as I went on to a vacation to Ladakh.

As a college fresher, I was always fascinated by desktop products. A small tool that would just make one small task easier. I always wanted to create such products myself. A little thing but it could make someone's day.
Then I went into Enterprise Java, because thats what most of the Indian software industry is into. And farther and farther away I went from such tools as desktop java was pretty much hopeless and I had no industry experience in C etc.
However, with the onset of Web 2.0, I see a possibility. I see how web based products can be equally, if not more, effective at solving problems and create value for users.

While the Indian software industry has already proved its worth in software services, it is still pretty nascent in software development. And I firmly believe that india is not just a service provider, it is also a huge market. Its high time that indian software companies exploit this market and provide services to its own consumers, rather than focusing only on US.

I am still continuing in software product development, and working in this industry has given me a lot of insight in web products. There has also been lots of insight two most successful revenue models for web products - Ad generated revenue and Lead Generated Revenue. Going forward, its pretty important for us software professionals to think on how we can address this indian market and provide services to our own people.

On the personal side, Lots of good things there as well. I had lots of trips and loads of fun with friends. However, as time is passing by, it is becoming increasing difficult to keep in touch with all friends.
As a perfect example of fast paced life we live in, there was a time when I had more than 10 friends in noida, and within 3 months of that, each one of them left for their individual reasons. I always dreaded the thought of living alone, but sometimes life doesn't give you a choice. Looking back the past 6 months, things haven't been bad. However, this had made my friends even more important in my life.

Friendship is the only real earning that I have after all these years, and I thank my friends for being "my friends". Wherever you are, however busy you are, just keep in touch.

Upgraded to Blogger Beta

Blogger recently launched a new beta version with new features like Labels, New Layout etc. As you might have noticed, this blog is now running on it.

The switching process was a breeze. The whole process including updating to a new layout based template took like 30 min, during which I played around with all the new things I could do with it.

The most important feature that compelled me to switch to this beta is the labels support. Now I can label my posts and clicking on a label takes you to all the posts with the same label. There is a labels box in the left hand sidebar which lists all the labels I have created. Hence readers interested in philosophical posts can find all of them together and need not be bothered with the tech posts. This feature was long overdue as most other popular commercial blog services provide it.
This feature also eliminates the need for me to maintain a separate tech blog. Its really difficult for me to maintain a separate tech blog, and hence I would not update the other blog anymore.

There have also been some changes in the template. There is a hierarchical blog archive on the left sidebar which provides much better navigation to the old posts.

Another change is the change in the feed url. In case you use a rss reader, please subscribe to this new feed url. There is also an option to subscribe to all comments on the blog. Or to comments of this individual post.

Overall, I'll give Blogger thumbs up for incorporating some long due changes which brings it at par with the commercial services out there.

Update 2/11/06: Looks like their is some issue with Blogger Beta feeds. The feeds do not show the date and time of the post when it was published. Instead it shows the last updated time of the post. I don't know whether its a feature or a bug but I liked it the earlier way.
Also, I have migrated my feeds to feedburner and updated the feed url links.

Firefox 1.5 review

Okay, I installed Firefox 1.5, looks good and most of my extensions worked as well. And the ones that don't work, it is showing them as disabled so that I don't lose track of them. There is also an find update option on each extension so that if a future release of the extension is compatible with it, it would be downloaded and installed. I also found this useful link to tweak Gcache extension to work with it.

First impressions, I didn't find much difference between the older version and this. The options screen has changed and it has this really cool setting of "Force links that open windows to open in new tabs". I always find it annoying when clicking on a link opens up a new Firefox window. I liked the way opera had everything contained in itself. Now firefox supports the same feature.

Other than this there is nothing tangible that I can point out, and I still have to figure out some of the extensions stuff, but the web surfing just seems cooler ;-)

Update: Jus tnoticed that upgrading made it lose the search engines that I added. Also, there is no direct way of deleting those search engines (there is an extension though, but I am feeling lazy to google right now)

My Google

Check this out. Google is offering a personalized page similar to My Yahoo. I don't want to get into the "Google is not a portal" kind of debate right now, but what's most amazing about the site is yet again the "UI".
This has a drag-and-drop portlets functionality. Just add all the portlets you want to view and then just drag and drop wherever you want to place it.

Remembering Gmail's UI, How is it that only Google applications provide these amazing out-of-the-box kind of UI functionality that others are not able to imitate?

Yahoo Messenger 7 Beta launched

The latest beta of yahoo messenger is out and I decided to give it a shot.

I remember trying out the yahoo messenger 6 beta last year when yahoo gave a completely new look and feel to their messenger and added a lot of features. Apart from the stealth setting feature which I found potentially useful, it was a disappointment. Unstable in terms of memory usage, sluggish responses especially when starting (I started it from taskbar, the whole taskbar used to hang for sometime till it started) and when signing out.

This beta however, though boasts of only few new features, is much more better with instant responses. My taskbar doesn't hang anymore, starting and signing out is done in a flash and the overall UI of the application is improved with fonts in the conversation window being better now to say the least. Also, the message archive can also show nicknames instead of yahoo id as per your preference setting.

The biggest USP as claimed for this release is the PC-to-PC Call feature, which is basically similar to the voice chat feature provided earlier, just that instead of the voice chat button, there is now a call button similar to what skype offers. The additional feature here is that one can now also leave offline voice messages. However, Yahoo has made it clear that unlike skype, which offers PC-phone calls, yahoo will stick to PC-PC calls.
Currently all the new features yahoo offers can be used only if both sides has the latest version, which is not the case with me, so with feature testing not possible for me, I would vote thumbs up for the better responsiveness and thumbs above average for better UI.

Gmail shows "Who's Boss"

I was surprised to see when checking my GMail account. Is this another April Fool joke. No this isn't, as it wasn't when google launched Gmail on 1st April last year providing 1 GB of email space, virtually unthinkable at that time. Today, Gmail has increased its storage to more than double.
While other email providers are still fighting over the storage, with yahoo recently announcing to increase its free email storage space to 1 GB (don't remember the link to the article :( ),Gmail has made it such a trivial thing.
Gmail adheres to its philosophy of unlimited storage and proves it yet again. No wonder I am a fan.

Update: Here's the link to Yahoo's Announcement.

2 years of software engineering

Today I complete 2 years in the software industry. I still remember 10th August, 2002. I received my B.Tech degree in the convocation ceremony and in the evening I left for Bangalore to join Infy on the 12th of August, 2002, exactly 2 years ago.
Now as I look back, I feel that things could have gone better. I have not be able to meet the professional targets that I have set for myself at that time. At the same time. I also feel that things could have gone much worse. Hence I would settle for a job reasonably well done.
Personally, I didn't have many targets 2 years ago. I have taken up whatever came up on my stride. So there should not be any no question of dissatisfaction there.
Targets have changed, Target types have changed, lets see how the life goes.