Real facts get lost even with all the tech advancements

I read this story about McDonald's Coffee case.

With so much of internet and mail technology advancements the real facts never reach all the people. False news/mails gets spread/forwarded much more than facts.

Similar opinion with fully story is here.

Tupperware and rest of the business world

Where as the aim of every business in the world is to use every means available to popularize its product and sell more Tupperware seems to be sticking to its stand and using only direct marketing as its only selling mode. I was surprised to read that they are resistant to internet and consultant is not permitted to maintain a website that promotes their Tupperware business, nor may they use any third party website such as eBay or amazon to sell Tupperware products.

They may also not undertake any advertising or publicity using the Tupperware name without the specific permission of the corporation, which sees such advertising as as trademark infringement. In practice, these policies primarily limits consultants to word of mouth advertising through the party plan.

As long as there is human race on earth there would be destruction

Humans boast themselves as the most advanced animals bilogically and mentally in nature. They can also boast about being the most mean, destructive, corrupt and selfish animal who have no considerstation what so ever about anyone or anything else in nature.

Without agreeing to the above it is very difficult to explain human behavior in various circumstances. Everyday newspapers pour out news about human atrocities againest other animals (including other humans) and nature. Some do it knowingly and some do it unknowignly or ignoring the knowledge they have!

It is shocking to read how the ocean is being getting robbed everyday of its wealth in the form of fishing, shark hunts, whale killing etc etc...how forests are being eroded and converted either into land for cultivation or cities.

I remember watching Living Planet in mid 80s by Sir David Attenborough.

I don't know what our future generations would get to see!

SilverLight is coming....

I had read this article long back.

When I heard of silver light from Microsoft, it made me remember this article.

As the page says would SliverLight be becoming better in the coming releases?

What is going to be Adobe's next move?
Are they going to beaf up the player and associated products in next releases?
Or they would come out with something totally new which would be the next center of attraction?
Did Adobe/Macromedia enjoy the monopoly for too long without paying much attention to improving the player by leaps and bounds? Or they had expected this move from MS?

As the article says it feels like the only way MS can keep growing in the coming years is by targetting successful products by other companies.

AdvancedDataGrid and lot more in Flex 3

Ted has mentioned about new features in upcoming release of Flex 3 here.

I also found several references to AdvancedDataGrid and other cool features in FlexBuilder 3 here.

One feature I like the most is support to switch between different version of SDKs.

It is very helpful in development as well as production environment. I have been using FB from day number one in Macromedia when I started working on Flex.

Only complaint I have about it is that it is very unpredictable as to when it would take the longest time to build a simple project when you want it to take the shortest!

Life as a corporate employee

Today I couldn't resist myself writing this because I wanted to get this out of my heart and continue working! Top management of any company has only one motive in their head: squeeze as much as possible out of every employee you have, out of his brain and out of his body. When you find that you can get the same thing out of somebody else at a lesser cost throw him out and get the new guy.

The second motive is to spend as less as possible on every employee to keep the profit figure at the highest possible level.

The third and most important motive is to make the employee believe that the company doesn't have the above motives and he/she comes first. The core value of the company is its people.

Human mind is so adaptive that though it knows very well about all the three motives it learns to live in the imaginary world created by the management as part of the third motive !!!

May be someday I will write the whole story which was the root cause for this out-burst.

Flex module for Apache and IIS released on Labs

Something which I wanted to happen from day one I started learning about Flex.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Module_for_Apache_and_IIS

Web 2.0 What is it?

I heard about Web 2.0 in a Adobe internal Tech conference at San Jose. I was so sleepy due to jet lag that I couldn't concentrate on the presentation. Today I found a reference to a good article about it from Kevin Lynch blog. Need to find time to read it !

Why do people blog?

I heard about blogging (please believe me) for the first time when I joined Macromedia in July 2005. I created my own blog after Manish sent out a mail to a group of people. As it is with any habit it is difficult to start and it is more difficult to get rid of it. And till now I have been able to blog only now and then but not regularly though I keep getting ideas on which I want to blog.

One such idea is : Why do people blog?

• Is it to share there thoughts?
• Is it the constant desire to communicate?
• Is it to develop friendship with people around the world?
• Is it to reduce feeling of loneliness which always creeps into once mind ?

Why, why do people blog?

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.

OpenLaszlo

Today I started studying 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

Charts in Flex

From the first day of the week I decided to dedicate the last half to one hour of the day to learn something new and interesting. So this week I started with learning Charts in Flex. I searched on google for a tutorial and it happened to point out this on MM site itself.

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.