Chrome WebStore

I opened my browser (read Google Chrome) yesterday and i saw something new in it. Apps !!! I was like, "Hello!! What are you?" And within two clicks of the mouse i end up in the CHROME WEBSTORE!!! It is awesome the way Google does it! Google has now housed all of its Chrome  Extensions, Skins and Apps (yes that is correct, Apps) under one roof and it is simply awesome to say the least. Most of these products or add-ons are free, but you can charge for your apps as well. It takes a nominal fee of $5 to submit your app into the Store itself. A price which is next to nothing in my opinion, given that it is a one time payment.

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Change the World or go home.

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The Blue Monster @ Microsoft
Scary? Don't be. This is what you will find on a few doors at the MS HQ. It can be interpreted in many ways. But, I chose to interpret it in a manner i will never be able to understand. Changing things is a very difficult thing to do. Changing the world is almost impossible. For most parts of our lives we end up trying to solve tough problems and manage to make the best sense of what life is, in our own context. To speak specifically about coders, they, we try to work out solutions for complex problems and feel elated about it. To be intelligent is good. But, what good is anything, if not met with true purpose. For me, true purpose is something that which brings change for the good. Something that makes lives better. Something that inspires me to do more, that which i am already doing, not because i am good at or need to be better at it. Instead because, it brought a smile to someone's face. While i was being an intent listener, someone today told questioned the point of doing research if one has to watch its results from one's grave. And i asked my self what would have happened if every great discovery or invention was viewed with such contempt. I do not hope or expect to effect direct change in some life in the poorest corner of this planet. I hope that what i do today, hopefully be used to change things in this world. It is with that simple idea that i wake up every morning. This was an abstract post meant to ask you one simple thing as a coder and a person of science and technology: What have you done to change the world around you? And how did you use technology to do it? Still thinking? Worried that whatever you have done was of no use but yo your own self and no body else's? Scared? Don't be. Because, it is ok to be like that. It is ok to be intelligent for your own next increment in pay. It is ok to be who you are. Change is difficult. Unless of course, you want to change and that is a start.

The Single most Important thing for a Coder

I was having this discussion with a friend of mine today as to what the most important thing for a coder is. Is it good coding ability or good coding standards? Is it about writing basic code which everyone can read or is it about writing brilliant code which no one can fathom, leave alone understand? Is it about knowing one technology/API/framework to a point from where you can rebuild its competitor technology/API/framework, or is it better to have a decent working knowledge of most known technologies around you? I keep having this talk with a lot of my friends and fellow coders. There are many attributes to this ever debated and talked of topic. However, there is this one standard denominator which puts all those talks and debates in unison.

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Contrast

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The CPU behind the white monitor is better"]
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[/caption] Interesting pic for today. Took this at my desk at office. At a friends b'day part. ;) Cheers!!!  

A Pop-Up Story

This is a tale of what i did at work today. It was lousy in a few ways but educating in many others (its all about perspective). Well, i was doing a lot of code refactoring today and it was truly, and no jokes here, truly a good leaning experience. The theme of today's lesson was simple, Encapsulation. In more elaborate terms, i learnt that service calls should not be made from pop ups. Why? Well, no one has given me any clear reason so far. But somehow it makes sense. A pop up is something very intermediate, right? Its primarily used for peripheral functions. All the actions of uploading data, giving out warning and status messages figures in pop ups. So why should you be making service calls from it? Apart from that, there is another reason why you should not be doing something like that: a pop up is essentially a control as well. Any control you ever make has to be under all circumstances independent of anything else.

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Defensive Coding

I will keep this short and simple. Today a senior of mine uttered this phrase, when i was talking ab0ut spanning out null checks all over the code. He said that it will be defensive coding and i soon realized why. The moment you have null check for everything in your code it becomes a little difficult to track down the root of the issue. While your code will be all running and may never break down, there will be issues which will look so mysterious to you that you will end up wasting an entire day just trying to debug one of them.

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Interface Inheritance

This friend of mine, pings me and asks my something about UML diagrams. Well, i answer his doubts and then i ask him what he was designing. That is when he tells me something i never thought of. What he told me, gave me a new insight to OOP and the fact that more the options you give to our friendly users for whom we are trying to build such brilliant technology, the more they will get confused by trying out and seriously using a gamut of all possible permutations of those options. In this case, the user is us, i.e Developers, Coders the whole class. Speaking of which, my friend told me about the most unique design pattern ever. He told me about a hierarchy of interfaces. "WHOOHA!!! Hold on!", i told my self,

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Haiku

No, this is not the operating system. Sorry to disappoint. This is actually an interesting question i came across a few days back. The problem is actually quite simple: code generate as many Haikus as the user wants. Now, why this got me interested is because i used to write a couple of Haikus myself. And i was decent at it as well (it was enough to get a couple of them published in my college magazine). So i sat about thinking what the possible methods of generating Japanese 3 line poetry with a 5-7-5 syllable rule via code be possible. Here is one idea that bounced my mind today and i would like to share it.

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The Attitude to Search

Second Year of Engineering, boring lecture in motion, fed up. Some of us stand up to tell the teacher that we have no interest in enduring this ordeal. The lecturer tells us that in no event will she teach the on-going topics, which is recited out for us to register, ever again. We walk out and one of my friends says out aloud, "Google maar lenge", Hindi for "We will google it."

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