Friday, November 24, 2006
Speaking of coincidences
Life has lot of surprises !
Jack and Suzy Welch on Work Life balance
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!
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Automated testing support for Flex is DONE!
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.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Flex 2 Released
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.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Automated testing support for Flex
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.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Death by prescription
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
Friday, March 03, 2006
My Grandfather
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.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
OpenLaszlo
- I was impressed by the learn in ten minutes explorer which allows you to play around and see the result. I wonder why MM didnot provide something similar with their Flex explorer.
- The container and its children are repeated automatically when the datapath points to an array of elements.
- Data access is XML based in Laszlo and I was interested to see their syntax for accessing the sub-nodes as I was not very successful and the way it can be done in Flex. I was happy to note the absolute and relative way of specifying the datapath properties as it helps a great deal to change only the relavent parent property without changing all the children.
I have not yet tried E4X support being provided in Flex. I need to test it soon to compare the two. - Creating user classes and derived classes in Laszlo is another cool feature which I liked. Does Flex allow a similar feature ? I have come across extending Flex framework classes in MXML but not creating user classes. I need to exploer this too.
- Defining events under object-orientation is confusing because it is different from defining attributes and defining methods. It should have been named defining event handlers.
I visited the company site too. The internet consumer/user facts presented there as a background for RIA development is very interesting. Though I have been one of those users being a developer I have never thought about the possible solution. To advance on the technical ladder which I plan to do as part of my long term carrier plan I need to develop the habit and ideas to have a look out for these kind of problems and their solutions.
I keep remembering a very good peom repeated very often my grand father.
What the other folk can do,
Why with patience may not you,
Only keep this rule in view,
Try, Try, Try again.
Product : http://www.openlaszlo.org
Company: http://www.laszlosystems.com
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Charts in Flex
I followed the tutorial and was really amazed at its capabilites. So little code but so much of functionality. I was impressed by the animation effect added in the end. May be my Maya background is playing a part here :-)
Earlier while working on my own mutual fund investment performance tracker in C# I had searched the net for some free C# code for graph. I found ZGraph. I was impressed by its working too. Now I would like to develop the same app with Flex and compare them. But they may not happen early because of the work load and holidays coming up !
I will play around with charts more in Flex and test other RIA products to see what do they provide and what not.
Someone against homoeopathy
I don't know why don't they conduct research on millions of people suffering from alleviate. I am sure even if they conduct one there are people and companies around to make sure those articles do not get published. I have seen many of my relatives suffering at the hands on the allopathic doctor.
Even if homoeopathy doesn't work at least it doesn't harm anyone like allopathy does.
So why not leave it alone and go after allopathy which does harm ?!
I wish this professor gets a very good disease which cannot be cured by any other medicinal line and comes to beg at the hands of homoeopathy for a cure or may be make him keep drinking water all his life as mentioned by himself.
Professor savages homeopathy
By Robin McKie The Observer London:
Millions of people use it to deal with illnesses ranging from asthma to migraine. Prince Charles believes it is the answer to many of the evils of modern life. But now Britain’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst of Exeter University, has denounced homeopathy as ineffective. “Homeopathic remedies don’t work,” he told The Observer. “Study after study has shown it is simply the purest form of placebo. You may as well take a glass of water than a homeopathic medicine.” Nor is Ernst’s disdain confined to homeopathy. Chiropractic, which involves spine manipulation to treat illnesses, and the laying on of hands to “cure” patients, are equally invalid, he says. Not surprisingly, his views and his studies have provoked furious reactions. Chiropractors and homeopaths have written in droves to Exeter to denounce him. But now the scourge of alternative medicine says he is going to have to quit because Exeter will no longer support him or his department. “They have never provided me with the money they originally promised me. Now we have been told in no uncertain terms that this department is going to close.” The university denied the charge. “Professor Ernst’s department has enough money to go on for a couple of more years,” said a spokesman. “We are trying to raise cash. It is premature to talk of closure.”
Ernst’s department was created in 1993 when Exeter was given £1.5 million by construction magnate Maurice Laing. When accepting these funds, Ernst said the university promised to raise the same amount again. “They never did,” he added. Ernst, then a professor of rehabilitation medicine in Vienna, took the job to bring scientific rigour to the study of alternative medicines, an approach that has made him a controversial figure in the field. An example is provided by Ernst’s study of arnica, given as a standard homeopathic treatment for bruising. Arnica or placebo “We arranged for patients after surgery to be given arnica or a placebo,” he said. “They didn’t know which they were getting. It made no difference. They got better at the same rate, whether they got arnica or the placebo. And arnica is a classic homeopathic remedy. It doesn’t work, however.” In another study, Ernst got five homeopaths to examine children with asthma. “Children are supposed to respond better than adults to homeopathy, and asthma is said to be particularly responsive to homeopathic treatments,” he said. “However, again we found no evidence homeopathy worked.”
Search Engine wars
I tried searching a solution for my windows 2000 sp4 problem on both. I got good results only in google. I tried searching for Deccan Herald e-paper which has been newly started. It was the first result in google and I could not trace it in previewseek. May be because they are in Beta or may be because I used to google I will continue to use google for some more time :-)
Windows 2000 SP4 problems...
I searched the internet (better late then never :-( ) to find that many users have faced similar problems. I found various solutions including bad sectors on hard-disk, ESCD problems, card problems, USB problems. But to my bad luck nothing worked for me. Even tried renaming the mup.sys file which was the last one to get loaded. But no luck.
Today I want to try the setup/recovery CD and see how it goes.
I will always hate Windows and its service packs.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Wait for a frame !
The requirement stems from the fact that it may be required to fetch the data before selectedItem can point to the correct item.
In the past while reading about improving performance I have read about lazy evaluation where in you defer the computation till the value is required. Does waiting for a frame fall into this category ? I feel it does because the evaluation of selectedItem is deferred and user is allowed to change dataProvider / selectedIndex (which may be the case mostly) without evaluating selectedItem.
In the past I also noticed a performance improvemnt being done by increasing the frame rate to a high value for a brief period of time and then using the normal frame rate value otherwise.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
From C++ world to Script world
After joining Macromedia I entered the world of ActionScript when I started working on Flex.
Do I miss all the features I enjoyed in C++ like multiple inheritence, operator overloading etc etc?
Not much. May be because I am developing a framework or may be I am getting used to interfaces now !
Now that I have been working on AS for nearly 5-6 months I feel both have their positive and negative points or should I say positive and positive points :-)
One of the strange new things I faced was the equal (==) and strictly equal operator (===).
The first one checks for value equality and second one checks for value and type equality.
You can find a discussion about this and the problem it can create here.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
One week into Adobe
The password policy is very strict and I had to spend some energy to get a password which will be accepted. It may soon come to a point where in I have to write down the password somewhere so that I won't forget it ! Should I blame the hackers out there for all this trouble ?
Flex development work continues. It is sometimes challenging and at other times painful to work on a framework. The number of things one needs to consider while implementing anything can be depressing ! And while making any small change you need to think several times to cover all use cases to make sure nothing else will be broken :-)
Met a colleague from my previous company Tata Elxsi today. Harsha is currently working in Japan in Cannon. He is working on printer drivers. Learnt a bit about English language in Japan. They have created a separate script to write English words and they have made it in such a way that no word can be correctly represented for pronunciation ! He told no one seems to know the reason behind the creation of the new script when it has such a serious drawback :-)
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
QA vs Dev
If QAs are given a goal to find n number of bugs per day and Dev is given a goal to fix n number of bugs per day (without injections!) how can both achieve their goals ?
I was writing about this topic yesterday and today I received an answer from a new Messenger friend of mine Rakesh Reddy from Hyderabad.
Newton's Laws to the Software World
Law 1. Every Software Engineer continues his state of chatting or forwarding mails unless he is assigned work by external unbalanced manager.
Law 2. The rate of change in the software is directly proportional to the payment received from client and takes place at the quick rate as when deadline force is applied.
Law 3 . For every Use Case Manifestation there is an equal but opposite Software Implementation.
Bonus Law 4. Bugs can neither be created nor be removed from software by a developer. It can only be converted from one form to another. The total number of bugs in the software always remains constant.
I think the bonus law answers my question !
Second day at Adobe...
Browser wars
Are people against MS success or MS policies or MS way of marketing or MS way of driving monopoly ? What are they really fighting against ?
What ever one does in this world there are always people who support you and people who are against you. Is it just to do with mind set or something else?
I have tried to use FireFox but normally I fall back to IE after some days because some of the sites I regualary visit like www.mutualfundsindia.com cannot be viewed properly in FireFox. For a bug reported on similar issue in www.ebay.com the mozilla developers have replied that it is a problem with the site itself as they are using IE specific tags in the pages !
I am sure with the above script making rounds on the internet may also conribute to increase in number of sites with similar pages !