Random Rants & Raves

Nope, this is not about us installing a new build of MS Office 2010. We have moved our company office from Sushant Towers in Sector 56 to a new location. Our office address now is:

Enterprise InfoTech
311, 3rd Floor,
F-Block Market,
South City II,
Gurgaon, Haryana – 122002

We still have a lot of organizing and cleanup to do which should take most of today.

I finally upgraded my blog with the latest version of BlogEngine.NET. This is a free, open source, implementation of an ASP.NET 2.0-3.5 blog. I was running v1.3 till now and have now upgraded to v1.5.07. There are a ton of new features in this release including new widgets, nested comments and more. I’ve implemented these features on the left column as you can see.

The theme that I use is called StarGazer created by Jason Lay. I’ve made massive modifications to this theme for my blog including:

• Moving the right side column completely to the left using CSS. This is because I sometimes have code and images that flow across the page and in the case of a right side column would cause the layout to go for a toss.
• Added the ability to use the first post as a Internet Explorer 8.0 WebSlice. This also requires a code change in the BlogEngine.NET core. I’ll be submitting this patch to the developers of BE soon.
• Changed a bunch of ASPX layout to add the nested comments feature of v1.5 of BE.
• Changed a huge bunch of CSS to get the styles correctly setup for different elements that didn’t even exist in the original theme but now appear due to structural changes in BE’s rendering.

For doing all this, it took me less than a couple of hours which included downloading, setting up and understanding the changes in BE1.5 on my local machine. I was greatly helped in the entire endeavor by Visual Studio 2008 and the Internet Explorer 8.0 Developer Toolbar. The latter was exceptionally useful in figuring out the classes and styles being used in any page and on the fly changing them to see what happens. Clearly a great tool to have for Web developers.

There are still some small changes that I need to do. The visitor info widget has a annoying icon that I want to get rid of and the Twitter widget doesn’t refresh automatically and the “Follow me” gives an error. I’ll need to look into this soon – but for now the blog is back up and running.

For anyone who is interested in the StarGazer theme, I’m putting it here to download:

I’m sitting here with mixed feelings. One is a sense of happiness and achievement of having bought a home. The second however is of extreme anger, sadness and helplessness. India’s just seen one of the most brazen terror attacks in history. In terms of absolute numbers, there have been times when the number of lives lost in single terror attacks have been greater. However, this was the most audacious such attack – openly walking in to famous stops across one of India’s biggest cities and causing havoc.

I’m not going to start analyzing what could have been done and how stupid the politicians are and how brave the men in uniform are. Facts of life. These are some of the things I plan to do. Maybe you’ll find some stuff in these that you might like to do as well.

• I do NOT want to light lamps, candles, prayer sticks for the terror victims, commandos, their families or whoever – unless they are in a critical orifice of a terrorist. Holding rallies, arm bands etc. is good enough to show anger at the government. But let’s be clear – showing the guys massacring innocents paper banners with “peace” on it is only probably get that paper stuffed in you along with some lead.
• I do NOT want to pay taxes + surcharges + cess + god-knows-what-else to the government when they can’t try (forget guarantee) to provide safety to my family and friends. I don’t mind paying even a little more taxes if the security forces are given adequate trainings and equipment. It was pathetic to see the Mumbai police standing on the Gateway of India before the NSG turned up with scope-less .303 rifles. Were they meant to be snipers? I doubt they could even hit a crow that landed next to them with that obsolete piece of junk. But no, the government wants to take my hard earned money and give it their vote banks in the name of caste, religion, region and gender!
• I WANT to be involved in more proactive citizen strategies to avoid such situations again. Being part of a neighborhood watch, weapons training in localities, etc.
• I WANT to instill a feeling pride, love and responsibility of the country in my son and I wish everyone else has that too. Which means that I want that there be compulsory military service for all youth.
• I WILL slap anyone talking about the great Indian resilience. Indian resilience is nothing but talking “intellectually” over glasses of whiskey while watching the news or in parties. 10 days later most people are going to be back watching the stupid, mindless, and endless soaps on the same TV.
• I WILL back a strong government. We need to show the world that anyone who looks at India with malicious thoughts that we will take them to task. I want them to hang Afzal TODAY! and if the government gives an excuse of law and order – well, it’s their frigging JOB to make sure we’re safe.
• I do NOT want to apply “Gandhigiri” and peace and love to the terrorists while showing them the other cheek. Gandhi never had to face this sort of fanaticism – remember, he was the one against the establishment, albeit in a peaceful manner.
• I will NEVER, ever vote for Insensitive louts masquerading as “leaders” (like RR & Shivraj Patil, Deshmukh, Naqvi, Achunanthan and others) and make sure that their own as well as their family’s political careers are completely over.
• I do NOT have any respect for so-called “intellectuals” like the Roys, Setvlads (any relation to Vlad the Impaler?) who spout nonsense when brave soldiers and policemen get killed and accuse them instead of having killed “innocent” terrorists. My appeal to the establishment is that if next time an event like this occurs, please get Roy and Setvlad and send them in to the innocents holding the AK47s to replace the hostages. After all, the poor, innocent youth-with-grenades are not going to harm them, are they?
• And finally, I will NOT bow my head before any religious deity EVER. I don’t care what kind of moronic reason people will give justifying “God”’s inaction. If anything, if this creature called God actually exists, it is even more despicable than the politicians of our country for seeing so many innocents being killed – and I don’t mean only in the Mumbai attacks but over the countless centuries of bloodshed that humans have done in it’s name. If there is such a creature, it sure does have a frigging thick hide to bear the disgusting acts done in its name.

There are a bunch of other things I’d like to do and say, but they’re not something that I’d want to write down. All in all, 26/11 is only ONE such event – India has faced far too many such incidents to start moving on yet again! You need to show your ANGER – not your RESILIENCE.

Finally, after years of trying to buy a house and meeting with challenges and almost got it instances, we’ve done it. We’ve managed to purchase an apartment in Sector 47, Gurgaon and move in there over the weekend. Here are some of the high- and low- lights of the transition as well as some pointers for those planning to purchase a house.

• It took us 3 years of searching, negotiating, fights and sleepless nights off and on to buy a house in Gurgaon.
• For all those media people who claim property prices are falling, they’ve got their heads in the clouds - prices in Gurgaon are atrocious.
• The apartment at a total built-up area of 2615 sq.ft. and covered area of 2365 sq.ft. is large compared to the most of the other apartments at the budget we had. Fairly well planned out other than the placement of structural beams and columns.
• We had to spend a huge amount of money more to get all the woodwork, electrical fittings, plumbing and painting done. Never trust the builder’s work in any of this.
• Make sure you apply for a home loan well in advance. The more the documentation you can provide, the faster the loan can get processed. Have scanned copies of anything and everything you can think of.
• Woodwork takes x*1.5 days at least where x is the number of days promised to you by the carpenter.

Anyway, I’ll put up some shots of the house soon. We’re still living out of boxes for this week while some plumbing and electricity stuff gets done.

Since I've been traveling for work almost continuously since March and have been extremely busy otherwise as well, I thought a small family vacation to my home town (Palghat, Kerala) would be a great respite. I packed up the wife and kid and went to Bangalore first where I had a 3-day SQL Server 2008 BI session to conduct. After that I sent them off to Palghat while I went to Pune to conduct an architecture design session for a client. Finally on Saturday I took a flight from Pune to Coimbatore and landed up home completely beat.

I was supposed to attend a cousin's engagement at Calicut on Monday, but I bailed - not really out of choice but because first my son, Akshat fell ill with an upset tummy and soon after so did I. My parents went off to Calicut and returned the same day.

I then planned to at least get some rejuvenating Ayurvedic massages done - but not only did it start raining like mad - making travel well nigh impossible - but my dad came down with a flu. The worst was yet to come - Neeta (my wife) suddenly developed an extreme case of pollen allergy due to the thick vegetation around. We were then constantly on phone with her doctor here and getting new medicines to give her. Since she was completely breathless and in pain, I had to take two decisions quickly - one, move out of my parents' house and into a hotel room with air conditioning and two, to cut short our vacation and reach back home in Gurgaon. So I had to cancel my non-refundable tickets and buy new ones for the next day and fly back.

So, in the end not only did I not get a vacation (which I still think is very well deserved/required), but instead got a whole bunch of tension and a good amount of money spent. What a waste!

I've been busy traveling the last couple of weeks and will continue doing traveling the next few weeks as well. Meaning that my blog updates are going to be few and far between during this time - but yes, building in a lot of stuff that I will be posting about soon.

Also, an upgrade to the hosting server on which my blog resides caused a small outage of the blog content already existing and required a bit of mucking around to get it back up again. All should be fine now going ahead.

For the 2nd year consecutively I've received a Gold Level Global Impact Award for my work as a Microsoft Regional Director along with 46 other RDs who have received it as well. Silver and Bronze levels were achieved by 24 and 25 RDs respectively. Overall 96 RDs have gotten an award and all Rds continue to be influencers of technology worldwide.

I'm proud, honored and even humbled to be part of this great group.

Last week I was sitting in my office last week and suddenly it hit me - it has been 22 years since I wrote my first computer program! Man, did that make me feel oooooollllllddd! The funny part is that I even remember the first program I wrote. It has an interesting story around it as well.

I was 10 years old (right - so now you know my age) at the time and my school announced that they were going to introduce computers as an optional subject that one could take up if one wished. I was interested in learning this (having been a Star Trek fan by then already), so with my parents' blessing I signed up. For the first few classes I took, there was no sign of a computer anywhere. It was all about ALU, SPU, VDU type type. And then we moved on to BASIC. All programming was done using pencil and paper only.

After about 10-15 days of this, our teacher announced that we will finally get to actually work on a computer. Imagine the anticipation that all of us kids had at the time. So when the day arrived, the teacher brought in the computer - a BBC Micro. We were then made to stand in a line and take 2 minutes each to write a program in BASIC on the console and run it. So dutifully, I too did this and when I reached the computer, I quickly typed out the following code (I had practice in typing on my Dad's typewriter, so was fairly ok on the keyboard as well)

10 PRINT "VINOD IS A GOOD BOY ";
20 GOTO 10

A long time in coming, I've finally put up my blog on my own vanity domain. It runs BlogEngine.NET 1.3 and is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 RC1 server on IIS7 - which hopefully will move to the RTM bits soon. Had some issues with getting it to work since the server is in shared hosting mode and there were some settings that BE uses that was disabled at the server level by my hosting provider - Znet India. Worked with them in debugging the issue and got it resolved. Thanks a ton to the Znet India team.

My old blog is still available. But all new posts will happen here from now on. You can use the Subscribe link on the top menu bar to get to the RSS feed.

Stay tuned for more updates  - I promise to write more regularly on this blog from now on.