4pm revelations

Daily around 4pm we go for coffee/tea/snacks. Few weeks back Ajit started a conversation saying he got thinking about religion,marriage after reading Anjali's blog about religion.

All people in their mid twenties have lot of confusion when it comes to marriage. They think they will loose their freedom after marriage. They think they may not find the correct match and run into trouble.

Ajit feels true friendships are developed from childhood and friendships started at later dates are superficial. That made me think about my fathers remark that child marriages were done keeping this view in mind. At that small age they become friends easily and adjust to each other very well.

I was happy and surprised to know from Sam that in their religion/community parents don't interfere with married life of their children and they are given a free hand. I think in India that approach makes lot of sense and if adopted by everyone all families will be more happier.

One of my maternal uncles keeps reminding me that who ever got married around the same time as me (Feb 14th 2001) have separated from their parents and I am the only one still living with parents.

Ajit visited Ramakrishna Ashram on one of the week-ends and bought some books on Vivekananda. After few pages he feels Vivekananda also had similar questions about life and religion which had come to his mind. Hopefully we will have more revelations about the book.

Speaking of coincidences

Soon after hitting the publish for the previous post I had to go and meet Nirav Mehta at the office who is a speaker at FOSS.IN and about whom I had read few minutes before.

Life has lot of surprises !

Jack and Suzy Welch on Work Life balance

Life has strange coincidences. After complaining about work/life balance few days back I was surprised to find the answer so soon from none other than Jack and Suzy.

I have been trying to get back to my routine of reading more about Homeopathy regularly everyday so that I can be ready to take care of my family whenever the need arises. Hopefully even with new assignments coming up at work for next version of Flex I would be able to keep up the balance and keep the routine.

My friend Jyoti is also a believer in Homeopathy and Magnetic therapy. She told me how she improved her eye sight and got rid of spectacles using them with the help of her father.

I also remembered that though I have bought the book Looking without glasses few months back I have not read through it.

While going through FOSS.IN schedule I found few interesting items. WET is open source automation testing tool built on Ruby. It also has a comparison with QTP and other tools and seems to be having all good things except for interactive debugging which QTP has.

It would be good to work on extending FLEX automated testing to work with WET. But I have to learn Ruby first.

Suddenly I have too much to read!

Automated testing support for Flex is DONE!

After many days oops... months of going underground due to heavy work schedule today got some free time to read something. Found a good one on Anjali's blog.

I have been working on Automated testing support for Flex for all these months. After a long time 7 years+ of gap I worked on many week-ends to finish the design and implementation. The 7 years I spent working on Studio and Maya from Alias (now Autodesk) I can't remember working on any week-end.

I was happy to find the items we worked on Adobe Photoshop Integration and Maya Artisan, Attribute and Script Painting, 3D Paint listed in the Maya features list. Vidyadhar, Sanjay, Venky and myself worked on Photoshop integration before I left Tata Elxsi. Chetan, Gowrishankar and myself were working on Artisan features before that.

Hopefully I would have free time to do things I have missed all these days. Though everyone talks about work/life balance it is difficult to achieve.

Flex 2 Released

Flex 2 got released last week. It is my first product shippment after I joined the Flex team in July 2005. I will be completing one year in another 16 days !

The basic SDK has been made free for the first time where as other pieces of the product suite are available for a price.

I have been busy making lot of changes and fixes to automated testing. More about it later.

I also started building an ActiveX control to communicate with a Flash SWF/ActionScript first hand. I could not get the ActiveX object to get created in JScript on IE for a whole day. Finally figured out that I need to add

BEGIN_CATEGORY_MAP(CTestTwo)
IMPLEMENTED_CATEGORY(CATID_SafeForScripting)
IMPLEMENTED_CATEGORY(CATID_SafeForInitializing)
END_CATEGORY_MAP()

to the interface to get going !

I don't know why few things have to be always hidden.

I was successfully able to pass strings across. ExternalInterface is a cool thing in Flash to communicate with JavaScript. I also want to try implementing the NPAPI to able to do the same thing in other browsers in next free time.

I have been trying to build a Graph component in Flex in my week-ends when my daughter is sleeping. But still long way to go before I can do the alpha release.

Automated testing support for Flex

I started working on AT for Flex last month. As of now it is supported only Quick Test Professional from Mercury and for the IE browser on Windows.

A preview release happened yesterday.

I have been working on bug fixing for few weeks now and moving on to supporting nested apps/RSLs from today.

I am new to RIA, Flash and internet. So I need to understand how to build RSLs and use them before I can start implementing/testing support for them in AT.

I found some material on RSL written by Roger here . But it is for Flex 1.5 and I couldnot make much use of it except for the information and advantages of RSL.


So I started using the FlexBuilder Beta 2 to build the apps. After some initial hickups I was able to build a shared library and a mother app using the lib.

Death by prescription

Read a article in a magazien about a Book "Death by prescription" by Dr Strand.

It is about deaths of people by taking drugs prescribed by Doctors in the US. I was surprised to learn that 70% of the doctors prescribe the medicine choosen by the patients by viewing TV ads ! It is also surprising that drug lobby is very powerful in the US too and it has lot of influence on the FDA to get drugs approved faster and by hiding reports which actually say that so and so drug has many side effects and may even cause death.

Ajax virus

Today I read in a article http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar152006/cyberspace16292006314.asp that now people are using AJAX to write viruses.

My Grandfather

My grandfather died on Monday night. He would have been 99 or so in May. No one remembers the exact date and year of his birth. So it is only a guess. His real age might have been higher.

He started life in a remote village in Karnataka and moved to Chennai in a very early age leaving his parents. He studied from 4th to Metriculation in Chennai living with his hosts and came to Bangalore in search of a job.

He moved from job to job as a stenographer before finally settling down in IISC then known as Tata Institute. He retired from IISC and went on to live in a house he had built in 16th cross Malleswaram. I am sure hundreads of people recognize him from the side business he did to supplement his income to bring up his large family of 5 sons and one daughter. He repaired watches. He picked up this art all by himself in very early age and it helped him through out his life.

He was very healthy through out his life and used to bicycle his way to 8th cross market even when he was 94-95. His only desire in the last years was to leave this world before he became dependent on anyone. He achieved it !

After his wifes death due to cancer he used to cook his own food for nearly 12 years. Only in the last year or so he was dependent on someone else for his food.

More on his life soon.