I was taught this lesson in my 1st year of engineering when i was working on my college magazine, Srijna. It was a simple idea and thought. Beyond anything else, it was a warning. The fact that you cannot please everyone is well ingrained in my head. I understand it better than most people. "Why?", you ask. Simply because, i fail at it over and over and over again. I find the whole notion challenging. Over the years i have witnessed it in many projects and activities in which i have been involved in. The world of professional software development is no different. I am not talking about my work at office. I am talking about Project Doughnut, the founding website team of my undergrad college. Today, after its soft launch nearly 2 and half weeks ago, the website was thrown into the deep waters of an online public forum. This was the kind of publicity we (the team and i) were and were not looking for. But then again, there was the feedback, which we took with intent ears and minds. Paid good attention to most of what people had to say. And that is where i realised that i had yet again set out on a road to keep every one happy, this is otherwise called User Acceptance Testing in the world of software development.
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In the current UI of Facebook if you want to add a relationship you really have to do a little bit of a treasure hunt. That is unless you know exactly where it is. You have to go to Profile>Edit Profile (a grey colored button right below the Home-Profile-Account tab strip)> Featured People. There are issues with this whole mechanism. And this is just one of those things that does not make Facebook's UI "idiot proof".
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In a software development process, there are always roadblocks, detours, U-Turns, poor pathways and long hopeless drives which seemingly lead no where. It happens in all kind of firms, big and small. It happens in the development in all kinds of systems, simple and complex. What has to wrong, will go wrong, and there is very little you can do to avoid it. But you can manage it well, if you are prepared. But here is the funny bit, most of your preparatory skills come with experience. So do not get upset if you do not find the IT industry the way you thought it would be. Its not a perfect world, and this walk of life is no exception.
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This is one awesome guide to Ruby on Rails i stumbled upon today. The whole thing is more or less a comic strip and you will end up laughing while learning for a change. So here is the link: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/
Have fun coding!!
I think i have written a few posts on popups and the issues with layer development before. Today, I was encountered with another classical situation involving Pages, views and pop-ups. And for a change i was invited to be a part of the debate. The scenario was as follows: We had a page, which was in all essence a master page dealing with the background service. This page fundamentally had a tab control with every tab's container having its own control. Now each of these controls led out to one or more popups (again effectively more controls). The issue was to treat the controls as controls and try to relinquish them of all Svc calls. Mind you at this stage no calls were being made from any of the controls but we just wanted to come up with a solution where in we could once and for all decide a standard protocol by which we could completely avert situations involving svc calls being made from the controls.
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I was asking this question the other day to myself as to why knowing a technology well, before using it is very important. Now, let me state for the record that i am an all out proponent of "learning on the fly". I think that there are too many things out there to learn, and life is just too short to learn most of those things and then to do something with that knowledge. But then again there have been situations in the past where i saw some dramatic changes happening in the whole code base in major software products. All those changes were because of an error which was occurring due to some constraint of the underlying technology/platform, which the coder did not account for while coding, simply because he was not aware of it. And the funny bit is that days were spent in trying to figure out what the issue was in the first place. So much of time and effort wasted, simply because one did not study, or shall i say did not have the time to study, the whole technology base in good detail. All that time spent in diagnosing the issue could have been spent in studying more about the technology before the coding even began.
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This is probably the most difficult thing to do in a typical website. No wonder there are so many successful Content Management Systems in place. No wonder Narayanan Murthy stressed on data, as a very important part of any system. It is no wonder, that when it comes to developing world class websites most of us fail. It is not due to a lack of quality software or poor aesthetics. The underlying reason why any website fails in today's world of information is simply due to poor or no content management, or a lack of high quality content all together.
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Well, i was posed with a rather strange situation today when i had to make Async Svc Calls from a Silverlight UI code. The issue was that i had to call a single service method in an iterative fashion, ideally in a loop. But the problem was that i was doing a lot of processing in the completed event handlers and the order of the processing was making a difference to my UI.
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[caption id="attachment_295" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="men at work"]
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So the sign says it all really, a lot of work going on with the 24th Feb approaching (that is the launch date of the college website that i am working on.) So for today here is a post that i posted a long time back on my blog on blogger: SMS 2.0
Cheers!
With my involvement in the ongoing work on my undergrad college website, i was asked to churn out a simple piece of code for a dynamic Google map for the location of AIT. I already did this using Static Maps some time ago and it was recieved well. But, there was a huge demand for a dynamic map and after a quick 30 min revision of the JS API i managed this fragment of rather simple code:
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