FolsomLake – Sacremanto : Awesome lake for a 1 day trip

Posted on May 27, 2007 by sureshkrishna

On 26.May.2007 i visited folsomlake near Roseville, Ca. It was the lake that we found on a detour. We went to the Auburn city with full of small hills and lot of cultivation around for the berries and christmas trees. We were at a place by name SHILOH TREE FARM in Auburn and by the time we went there we were told that the farm is oipened only during the monthof december. The farm owner has kindly let us in to see and stroll the farm a little-bit. But with a little bit of caution that he killed around 2 rattle snakes in the past week and to watch carefully around. That took the party mood out of my peopld and everyone is like….when are we getting into the car and run out of this place. We barely managed to take few snaps and then we hurried to come down the hill.

But the interesting part was that from that hill, we could see the beauty of the lake at a far distance and its was beautiful. I did visit few lakes in Germany and Swiss but i am truly amazed with this one. As i hear there are 3 or 4 entry points to this lake and once you get in…. you can take your own time to move around in the car and park it in a place where you can spend some time alone. There are some places that are really crowded. You have to take your beach ware kind of stuff is you really want to enjoy. They do rent some boats.

We really enjoyed a lot and i woud definately recomment this place.

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Germany-Stuttgart : A life time experience

Posted on May 21, 2007 by sureshkrishna

In the initial stages of my career i was working for Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany. I was deputed to germany for almost 3.5 years. As Bosch’s head quarters is in Stuttgart, i had to stay here for all the while. This place has a decent amount of indian colleagues with some Indian and Srilankan restaurants. People who used to come on short term assignments stay at Hotel Domino, Stammheim; Hotel Feuerbach im Biburturm, Feuerbach; and so many other places. Every one used to prefer Hotel Domino as its near to Bosch in Feuerbach.

I was initially staying in the Hotel Domino for a long time and then i moved to an apartment in Nier Steiner Strasse, Gerlingen. Most of us were kind of bachelors and used to really have a radical time 🙂 . Tipical life is to get up around 7.00am in the morning and smoke, smoke, smoke, no breakfast, go to office by 9.00am, ….start work…smoke, lunch, back to work, back to home by 6.00pm and then got to jogging, dinner, pep-talk with your friends. Honestly for vegitarians, it is a hell there. But still better than USA. A lot better. Atleast you get boiled potatoes, zuchini, carrots or brokkali.

There used to be the Rosen Stein Park near Haupt Bahn Hauf and it used to be really lively and we (myself and Ramakanth) used to go for cycling. You cycle for around 2-3 hours and you feel so nice. Especially there is a beer hub in this park. We used to have a beer and used to peddle back.

There used to be a Fern Zenturm(TV Tower) and it is really nice. It used to be around 200 meters in height and by the time we go up you want to have a coffee or some hot drinks. The view if Stuttgart we get from there is awesome. We used to take trams and go there in the evenings.

Who can forget the Mercedes Benz museum. Wow its a master piece of its own. If you go in, it will take minimum of 2 hours to see all the car models. The kind of key-chains, sovereigns you get there are really cool.

Daimler Benz Stadium is a place of its own to hang out… the foot ball matches that happen there are a worth remember. The kind of cheering that goes on, beer cans smell, the crowd, the music, etc… are worth a million.

The local wine that you get there is really awesome. I gor got some of the names….but Trollinger, Lemberger are some. Neat feuerbach we used to be regular visitors of Wichtel. Its a beer place and nice pizzaaaaaaasssss…. Anyone would have to visit this place.

In the end i would like to goback to Stuttgart for a vacation. Right now i am married and my wife does not speak German. So its better for me to stick to English speaking countries 🙂

Posted in reviews, travel | 4 Comments

Is Eclipse getting Eclipsed ?

Posted on April 30, 2007 by sureshkrishna

I have been working on the Eclipse platform right from version 2.0. I have lead few projects on the Automotive and Internet Industries. Initially around 2001 and 2002, there were lot of announcements from the member companies and new joiners in the eclipse eco system.

In the recent years there were many new projects that have evolved into a full blown features(J2EE, WTP, ATP, STP, TPTP, etc…). All of a sudden i have a feeling that the eclipse eco system has stopped any major contributions. No major contributions were made from 2006 mid till now. I understand that the platform is been made stable and i have no complaints about it. Rest of the projects seem to be moving in the Tortoise and Tortoise race.

Is the Eclipse community (eco system) planning not to sponsor many of the new projects? or the contributors are not serious about the deadlines and commitments or eclipse is more of a stabl;e product and given to the community to build more and mroe commercial products around it.

I am sure the big Blue has a major role in the direction of the eclipse, but where is Eclipse leading to … Is Hare turning into Tortoise ???

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Eclipse feature configuration via Links

Posted on January 11, 2007 by sureshkrishna

The number of features and plug-ins available for eclipse are really growing in zillions. Overwhelming part is that many have contributed very good features to open source community. Sourceforge is one of it. Initially when i started i had only Eclipse Platform, then RCP, then WTP, then ATF, … and the number is increasing day-by-day. At some point of time we always agree that installing/configuring a third party features is always cumbersome. I have had many difficulties in managing the updates and new versions.

Though its old concept, i recently found this configuration of features via links. The approach is pretty neat and straight forward. You don’t have to touch the platform or rcp configuration of eclipse at all 😉 that’s the beauty of it.

I will just take an example and explain how this works. If we want to install a feature in eclipse without disturbing the current configuration, we need to first create a directory by name “links” directly under the eclipse directory (remember this is the directory where the eclipse.exe is present).

If we have the feature from the third party in the directory “c:\example\XYZFeature”. Please remember that under XYZFeature we need to have the “eclipse” directory and under that “plugins” and “features” directories. And now you are almost there to have a clean installations.

if your feature name is com.abcCompany.xyzPlugin, then we create a file by name “com.abcCompany.xyzPlugin.link” in the link directory. Open the file in a text editor and edit it to contain “path=c:\example\XYZFeature”.

That’s it you are there. Just launch the eclipse and it will parse the link directory and the *.link files and your launch will be configured for this.

Hope this helps for some of you who are looking for it in the product development and installation. The real advantage with this approach is you don’t have to enable or disable your feature from eclipse. Just delete a *.link file and you are done.

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Aptana : Source code editor for js, jsp, html, css

Posted on January 1, 2007 by sureshkrishna

I have recently used the Aptana Source code editor. Its been almost from 2 months i have been using  this editor.  Somehow i am quite impressed with the performance and the features provided by the Aptana editor. Initially i just used the standalone IDE from Aptana. I pirmarily used it for editing the javascript files for Web 2.0. Initially i really used it for the syntax highlighting, outline view with the structure, code completion stuff and i found it was really really great. Honestly i was actually asking my team too to adopt the same.

I was actually very very happy that its based on the Eclipse as i love eclipse and i am an eclipse evangelist. And some time in mid of November i got to know that Aptana has released the source code to the eclipse under EPL. So the Aptana is EPLed.  Wow for me personally i feel great to see more and more projects joining the Eclipse community. The only thing i did not like about it is that, its under the perforce. So inevitable i need to download the perforce client. But you always need to do some initial setting, as always with the software 🙂

I had to start a Web 2.0 project recently and i need to design an IDE. We had some project artifacts (AJAX Runtime) and some proprietary info to be associated, a typical product developement company’s proprietary files, some js, htmls, etc… So the first impression was to get the WST from Eclipse. But i was sure that Aptana provides much better editability, so i just saw how i can really integrate the Aptana into Eclipse. Aptana eclipse IDE has a feature that can be installed as a normal eclipse feature. So, is you really want to have the cool features, to edit the files of Web 2.0 files, then you better to have the Aptana working for you. I was just wondering why the WST project has not come up to the expectations. Probably for the J2EE stuff, may be its fine but for the source file editing, i am not sure of the meturity of the WST plug-ins.

Anyway some how the WST is toooo huge, i am not sure why… if i want to have a product built on the thus, i would think twice… Even though the now-a-days desktops and laptops are fully equipped with more RAM, most customers are expecting the IDEs to be very very compact 🙂

In my experience Aptana IDE is cute, small and does good work for you.

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Multiple timezone clock (in simple html and flash)

Posted on December 27, 2006 by sureshkrishna

For all those who want to have multiple timezones…i have a small program which does the trick. The cool thing is its free and if you are online its great. Thanks to www.worldtimeserver.com.

<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>World Calender</TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY><HR><div align="center">
    <TABLE border="1" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
      <TR>
	<TD><table border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
           <tr><td><embed src="http://www.worldtimeserver.com/clocks/wtsclock001.swf?color=ff1493&wtsid=IN" width="200" height="200" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></td></tr>
           <tr><td><h2 align="center">India</h2></td></tr>
           </table>
        </TD>
	<TD><table border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
            <tr><td><embed src="http://www.worldtimeserver.com/clocks/wtsclock001.swf?color=FF9900&wtsid=US-NY" width="200" height="200" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></td></tr>
            <tr><td><h2 align="center">New Jersey</h2></td></tr>
            </table>
        </TD>
	<TD><table border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2">
            <tr><td><embed src="http://www.worldtimeserver.com/clocks/wtsclock001.swf?color=000000&wtsid=US-CA" width="200" height="200" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></td></tr>
            <tr><td><h2 align="center">California</h2></td></tr>
            </table></div>
        </TD>
      </TR>
</TABLE>
<HR>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Posted in miscellaneous | 66 Comments

PShelf Widget in Eclipse

Posted on December 21, 2006 by sureshkrishna

PShelf Widget is really cool, if you want to implement a kind of Accordion widget in Eclipse. The Accordion widget is been gaining popularity in the end user community, especially with the AJAX and SOA presence.

Currently for simple implementations it looks quite stable. I had no problems till now. I have no idea when this project nebula is going to get integrated, but i am looking forward to it.

One good thing about this widget is that we can increase or decrease the time delay in the shelf roll-out. It also gives a very smooth transition from shelf to shelf. Can be very easily embedded into a View.

I am just adding a small snippet for the PShelf usage in a View. Hope this helps. Also this widget library it self is very very small, so you can include it very easily.


public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
/* Create a grid layout object so the text and treeviewer
* are layed out the way I want. */
GridLayout layout = new GridLayout();
layout.numColumns = 1;
layout.verticalSpacing = 2;
layout.marginWidth = 0;
layout.marginHeight = 2;
parent.setLayout(layout);
text = new Text(parent, SWT.READ_ONLY | SWT.SINGLE | SWT.BORDER);
// layout the text field above the treeviewer
GridData layoutData = new GridData();
layoutData.grabExcessHorizontalSpace = true;
layoutData.horizontalAlignment = GridData.FILL;
text.setLayoutData(layoutData);
PShelf shelf = new PShelf(parent, SWT.BORDER);
PShelfItem shelfGroup1 = new PShelfItem(shelf, SWT.NONE);
shelfGroup1.setText("Group 1");
shelfGroup1.getBody().setLayout(new FillLayout());
Table componentTable = new Table(shelfGroup1.getBody(), SWT.NONE);
createTableItem(componentTable, "Item11");
PShelfItem shelfGroup2 = new PShelfItem(shelf, SWT.NONE);
shelfGroup2.setText("Group 2");
shelfGroup2.getBody().setLayout(new FillLayout());
Table containerTable = new Table(shelfGroup2.getBody(), SWT.NONE);
createTableItem(containerTable, "Item21");
PShelfItem shelfGroup3 = new PShelfItem(shelf, SWT.NONE);
shelfGroup3.setText("Group 3");
shelfGroup3.getBody().setLayout(new FillLayout());
Table advancedWidgets = new Table(shelfGroup3.getBody(), SWT.NONE);
createTableItem(advancedWidgets, "Item31");
GridData shelfLayoutData = new GridData(SWT.FILL, SWT.FILL, true, true);
shelf.setLayoutData(shelfLayoutData);
}

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Quality vs Process in Software Industry

Posted on December 12, 2006 by sureshkrishna

I am trying to understand the difference between the Quality and Process, which we very often use in an interchangeable manner. After few years of my experience in different roles of Project Leader and Technical manager, now i am in a position to understand the REAL difference.

On a global perspective, the “Process Orientation” is the buzz word in the corporates. ISO 2000 certification, CMM Level2-Level5, Six Sigma, Agile Methodology and TSP/PSP are some of the well known processes in the implementation. Of course many corporates implement a subset of these processes also and might not really call with the real names.

“Process is a sequence of steps to achieve a Task“, is the simplest definition i have. I strongly believe in this definition by my heart and sole 🙂 Now i have seen many guys who have really used Quality and Process as a single word. Some of the irritating dialogs i come across were….
#1 There is not quality in the software (They meant, Process implementation is bad)
#2 You have not implemented Process, Stop the delivery to the customer (They think, process non-conformance means LOW in quality)
#3 This month your Process Implementation index is 100% (some times this is because, there is no software delivered or developed)
#4 We produce a very high quality software (but at the customer’s site, the software bombs)
I am sure that all of us would have had a chance to hear this and then wonder, what the senior manager is talking about.

The real problem i see is the lack of awareness and education in the developers, middle managers and finally the senior managers. The people who pester us to implement the process, would have never implemented a single line of code nor the process. In my view a software practitioner is the best person to decide, which process is suitable for the project. He is the one who can say Why, When, Where, What and How. The Quality department just need to assist mainly in What and How.

We need to really distinguish between the Heavy processes and Lightweight processes. In my experience, i categorize ISO 9002, CMM as heavy weight processes; Agile Methodology and PSP/TSP as Lightweight processes. As a general convention, many Service Based Software industry follows ISO and CMM and Product Based software industry follows light weight processes (like Extreme Programming).

Coming to the Quality, i define it as the factor which determine closeness to the requirements, features and the customer/end user expectations. Of course this drills down to the different factors like
#1 How well do we understand the requirements
#2 Translation of the Customer Requirements to the System Requirements
#3 Analysis of the Market/Competition/TargetIndustry/TargetEndUsers, etc…
#4 Good Design Practices (specific to project)
#5 The right-passionate team to do the development
#6 Good coding practices
#7 Developer Documentation, End user Documentation
#8 Aesthetics of the Software (Not only limited to the UI)
#9 End user support
#10 Training

In my view Process is the one which assists to achieve a good quality software. It does not mean that Quality is not attained with out Process. This is a common conception amongst many of us. In small teams, the steps taken for a development project are pretty straight forward and simple. Get the requirements in any format you want (as long as its understood by many of us), design of the module is a very simple process (some times its in the developers brain), coding is done to meet the requirements, simple user documentation, deliver. I have seen all these phases as simple as i have written in some projects. And it works perfectly in some scenarios.

The same scenario, when transposed to a large organization with multiple projects, distributed and cross-functional teams, things gets complicated. This scenario requires a more formal way of managing the Contracts, Work Orders, Reporting Formats, Monthly Reports, Project Plans, Project Management Tools, Requirements, Design, Coding, Testing, Documentation, Delivery and User support, to mention a few. Now the challenging issue is to get all the teams to follow the same process and similar steps to achieve the goal of the organization.

Finally…. Quality is in People, The Software we write, Innovative Thinking and the Ability to Deliver the right things perceived by the customer.

Posted in reviews, software, technology | Leave a comment

Wanna start a startup….?

Posted on December 12, 2006 by sureshkrishna

This is been there in my mind or a long time… “To start or NOT to start..”
I guess fro all the confused brains, following site might help.

http://www.fastcompany.com/homepage/index.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

http://www.startupjournal.com/

http://www.startups.co.uk/

http://www.onlinemastersdegree.com/resources/keys-to-startup-success/

Posted in entrepreneurship, startups | Leave a comment

Competition and Self Identity in India

Posted on December 12, 2006 by sureshkrishna

Competition : An occasion on which a winner is selected from among two or more contestants. Are you a Winner. Ofcourse, most of us are winners at some point or the other. Thats the time we have felt the top of the world, a little high, proudness, recognition in the crowd/society, increased respect from the family members, and a lot more. I am sure we do agree that all these are the factors that drives us to be competent.

Self Identity : Its a set of qualities and passion that distinguishes one from another. e.g. BillGates and Myself 🙂 . I have my own and he has his own identity. This is also a result of mental state and perception that we have right from the childhood.

I am sure all of us depending on our backgrounds and ethnic grounds, we have dreamt of many things. I wanted to be an Actor. Believe me….i always dreamt of to be a best actor in the world (till 13-15 years of age). Right from my 8th grade, i wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to do something with the fundamental and astro physics. Was verymuch interested to see if i can increase the days length. Instead of 24 hours, it shoudl be around 48 hours. I wanted it coz, i want to spend more time with my Girlfriend in school and also can get more time for Cricket. Neverthe less that never happened. And finally after all these years of becoming this and that….Ya…..now i am a Software engineer 🙁

After some time i get to see lot of world outside my home, city, state and country. I was one of those young people, to get to travel to many countries. And all the time i was thinking i have achieved a lot and i am gr8. But when i saw the world outside, i have started “thinking“. In the due course of time, we all get into a kind of competitive mood, to get into Engineering, Medicine, Law, etc… And now ritght from the 10th grade we have been PUSHED to get good grades and show that u r capable. Its the result of peer, family and society pressure. When i got an average of 80% in my +2, the postman in my area, has made a remark that his son got around 90%. Wow thats great, for a moment i felt deminished. Anyway, who cares…thats what i have got and thats what i am.

Inida is a country with 1.3 billion people. As i know tehre are around 200+ engineering colleges in the state Andhra Pradesh. Now you can assume the amount of the crowd that comes out of the collage every year. Now all thse kids need to be placed in soem companies 🙁 .

The irony is that, from 10th grade we stop every thing. Literally every thing. Dont do excercises; Dont go to dancing lessons; Dont play; Dont watch TV; Dont attend parties; Dont go to Swimming lessons; No social work; All these are a waste of time. Inshort, anything thats not books related is a time of waste. Wow…by the time we come out of the collages and getinto the jobs, we are worthless kids. Except the work related topics, we are not good at ANYTHING else.

And what we also lack is the realization that we are becoming too focussed on studies and letting other side of the life near to EMPTY. Ofcourse all this while we are so focussed and so TUNED towards this kind of “lifestyle“, we believe thats THE LIFE. Instead of giving our kids all the necessary KNOWLEDGE thats required to lead a successful life, we give then only a CAREER. In my view the CAREER is a part of the life but not the LIFE it self. We dont train them emotionally. Else, we woudlnot see so many suicide cases, coz they did not get through a competitive exam. Thats funny right…

Do any of us remember days when we actually set aside out official work, coz we want to spend time with kids, parents, wife/husband and friends. Did we fight at office saying that, i cant do this work coz i want to attend my gym/trecking/longdrive/painting/social work. I am not saying that we dont do it. But how often and how passionately we do the other things in life.

The Society that we have….this is a real tricky part. When we go to public gatherings or fucntions, did we ever see ourselves talking something other than our professional topics. A person who has done medicine cant get close to a engineer. We say..ha…his attitue and ideas are different. I cant talk to him in terms of engineering design, mechanical structures, the 8th wonder of the world i have in mind.

I am just wondering why dont we BE what we are. Its important ti be competitive and at the same time we also have to give importance to over all development and SELF IDENTITY. If all software engineers, if all are doctors, then WHO AM I. Do i have a recognition as a PERSON, other than my profession….

Posted in management, reviews | Tagged , | 2 Comments