Happy Birthday Google!

Google is 7 years old!

I have been a big fan of Google and almost all its services. I simply love the simplicity and comprehensiveness in thier offerings. I tend to turn to Google to find information about anything and everything. And I use Google almost every day.

I love the way they offer simple products, take the search, or Gmail or Picasa or this: Blogger. THe interfaces are simple and Intuitive. Navigation is a breeze. Of course, for arguments sake, these are kinds of interfaces that are suitable for a certain types of applications. I would not want my programming IDE to be this simple, for I will get annoyed with its limitations very fast in that case. But having said that, Google has the best interfaces for what it does.

I have been reading quite a bit on Google's activities lately and seems they are on thier way to re-define how we do computing. I for one, is looking ofrward to that!

To go or not to go

I have been toying with the idea of becoming an Independent Software Consultant (ISC), which is a glorified name for a freelance programmer, for sometime now. There was a time that I was quite confident that I could make what ever I make in my day job very easily as an ISC in a couple of weeks, provided I find work.

The biggest worry was not having a steady income, although the potential for earnings was higher. The only way to ensure a steady income was to work a dedicated amount of time for a client every week.

For this, I did find one client in the US, but his timings were not very practical for me. Working for him required me to stay up for most part of the night for six days a week. And that was taking away the time that I had to spend with my wife. So after a couple of weeks, I said no to that deal.

Then I had very good deal going, where I was maintaining a software for another client. This was a web-based application and the client, who was a software development company themselves, had me maintaining a system they had developed for a client. It was developed using ASP.NET, a skill which they did not posses, and they had got it developed by a freelance programmer who was not available anymore. They used to send me the bug lists, which I received in the morning, and I use d work on them during the day and upload the deliverables to their server by my evening, which was their morning. And I billed them by the hour.

This was a deal that worked very well for me for a few months, until my contact point there suddenly decided to leave that company. He introduced me to another contact person, but he was rather non-responsive and I was left in the dark. I did get paid for my work though. But right now, I am without a proper long term working arrangement, so my recurring ISC work has come to a halt.

But on the bright side, I have two freelance projects that I have taken up which needs to be finished. So I might as well use this time to complete these and get them out of the way and then start looking for more projects.

And who knows, I may get landed with a few long duration projects and I might actually become a full time ISC, and say good bye to my low paying day job!

The Demise of Jangama portal

The Jangama portal site has had a natural death. When you are not updating the content of a site at least on a daily basis, it is natural for that site to see a natural demise.

I was looking for a free hosting service which was capable of hosting a DotNetNuke site. But, there were virtually none. And, I was reluctant in spending time in creating a portal as a sub domain in some other web site.

Losing an unborn child

The saddest that can happen to a person is losing of a loved one. But when this loved one is your unborn child, you have a feeling of complete and utter loss, because it takes away a heap of hopes you had pinned on the future.

Losing a child is the most sorrowful event a parent can face. Losing an unborn child is the most painful experience for parents to be. Though his existence has been only for a few months within his mothers’ womb, still the loss is the same. Medical science may say that his chances for survival was only 80% and that the other 20% has taken precedence in this instance, but that is no explanation to a weeping heart. That does not bring any consolation or mend the shattered dreams of sharing the life with him or all the plans we had for him. And that day, 19th of August will be one of the darkest days of our lives.

Though you did not exist in this world even for a day and that you had no identity in this world, for your mother and I, you will be our first child that we never had. Though you are not with us and we never got to see your face, you will be our first (un)born.

Until the day we meet again… good-bye my child.

Re-birth of Jangama portal

After a lapse of some time I started on the Jangama portal today. I found a great new host and am in the process of setting up the site. Now I want to create the portal as a general portal site. My earlier aim was to create a portal for mobile users. But now I feel having it as a general portal would be much better rather than going in as a specialized forum.

I have updated the DNS entries and have informed the host to do the necessary configuration changes as well. So in the day or two www.jangama.com should point to my new portal. Hope I'd have people registering and contributing to the portal.

Money Value of Time

Last week I made a decision. I decided to let go of a very lucrative part time job inorder to spend more time with my family, i.e. my wife.

My offer was to work online everyday from 9.00 PM to Midnight for a US based client. ANd the pay was very good compared to Sri Lankan salaries. But the tradeoff was it was the time of the day that I had for my wife.

I tried it for a couple of weeks. The pay was good, I could see a lot of money coming my way. But we hardly got any time together. Had no time to take her out, even to go shopping after work or to go out for dinner. I had to rush back home and log in by 9.00.

The result was I was always tensed up everytime I got caught to a traffic jam on the way home from work and my wife had to do all the things by her slef, so everywhere by her self. This was not something we were used to doing. We were used to doing things together. And we were missing each other even though we were in the same room.

So I quit the job. Now I may have lost my additional income stream. But I have got back something much more valuable. Time spent together with the person that I love most!

We're so exited!

Today is a very very special day for both of us; me and my sweetie.

Why? Because we confirmed that my sweetie is pregnant. WOW!

When I went to collect the test results the lab technician said "Congrats! The test is positive. Your wife is pregnant!" And I couldn't stop grinning!

When I came back to the car, Lush kept on asking me What? But I couldn't tell anything, I was just grining. I had tears in my eyes. I finally told her "Your pregnant!"

Boy was that good news or what! She had tears in her eyes, and so did I. We were so happy!

SO now, my wify is officially pregnant! We are so exited and so happy, we dont know what to do next!

I love you sweetie. You are going to give me the best present ever! A Kid!

QuickMBA: Short Articles

QuickMBA: Accounting, Business Law, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Management, Marketing, Operations, Statistics, Strategy
I don't think these articles will help an MBA at all. Cos these are very brief and just gives you an introduction or a summary to the topics discussed. But to be fair, I think they provide good entry points to many topics and acts as refreshers for those like me, who have studied for an MBA but is not using all that you have learned in your day to day life.

I enjoyed reading up the economic stuff. It's after a long time that I read any economy related stuff, after the MBA exam on economics! But what got me there was the article on Steven Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people.

Happy reading all you folks!

BrowserCaps and other Browser Testing/Detection Resources

BrowserCaps and other Browser Testing/Detection Resources:

If, like me, you have been struggling with FireFox not rendering your ASP.NET pages the way you have designed them, and if they seem to be working perfectly in IE, then you may be scratching your head trying to figure out what the heck is wrong.

Well, I dunno if the problem is with .NET or FireFox, but it seems the problem is that .NET considers FireFox to be a downlevel browser. It could be because the signature of FIreFox is not identifiable by .NET, since FireFox was not around when .NET saw the light of the day.

But whatever the reasons are, the good news is, because of the flexibility of .NET, you can fix this from .NET. So you don't have to wait till FireFox fixes it, you can do it yourself. Well if you are wondering how to do it, then read Rob (@slingfive) Eberhardt's BrowserCaps and other Browser Testing/Detection Resources:. He tells you what you need to do.

Good luck.

Happy Anniversary Malli & Shiyara

It's my brothers' 1st wedding anniversary! It's been a year and within that year he has already become a father of twin girls! Life is moving pretty fast!

Happy anniversary Bro!

Managing Scope Creep

I am sure every project manager has faced this problem at least once. When a project is in progress, the clients discover new ways of doing things, discover better to have things, or they discover the things that they missed or forgot to mention.

I have been experiencing these kinds of scope creeps from my clients time to time. As the project reaches it's end, before they have to sign off they discover things they must have in order to go live, but forgot to mention in the outset. Obviously these are things that I did not anticipate or budgeted for.

I try to stick to the original project scope as much as possible. But at times in order to strengthen the relationship with the client and with the view of retaining him/her for the long term or just as a favour if he has been a good client, I accommodate a few, provided they are not major work.

But a more professional and realistic approach that I have adopted is to explain to them the gravity of these new requirements and to explain to them the that I have not estimated for these work. But I don't totally let them down. I do offer to tackle these tasks as a separate project.

Doing this gives me a slight advantage. Firstly, I am very clear about what needs to be done and can make a better assessment of the work required and hence can give the client an accurate estimate on time and cost. Because by that time I have already analyzed the problem and and devised a solution as well. Also, since the solution is already in my mind I can provide the solution pretty fast. Thirdly, I get a steady stream of projects. From the point of view of the client, they are also comfortable with working with me because I have already impressed them with my prior work!

From a marketing point of view also, I think my strategy is helpful because I am building long term relationships with my clients. As the saying goes it's more profitable to retain a client than to find a new one. The trick is client satisfaction without too much of a cost to you!

Working across time zones

I am feeling quite good today. Cos I managed to finish one project on time and the client accepted my work without even a wink of the eye. It was a good project and he was a good client. I'd really love to work for you again Ramon.

And I had to chat up two other clients because we were having serious communication gaps. The gaps were created mainly due to the time zone differences. When I work they are not and when they do I am not. So I send them a mail asking for a clarification or explaining something I have done and I end up getting an answer the next day and my response goes to them the next day etc. So I decided to get things moving faster, so I had to stay up and chat them up.

They were productive sessions. Clarified and agreed upon almost all the things that were pending at hand. So today I did what I promised I'd do and sent them the stuff. Now tonight I have to chat to them again to see their response. Unless I don't get that done tonight, I'll only be able to catch them on Monday evening. Cant wait that long, cos my deadlines are nearing.

The only thing bad about client interactions that go late into the night is that does not digest well with my wifee! She hates it when I have to stay up to work cos she misses cuddling upto me! Well, that's something I'll have to find a way to balance. Can't disappoint her at any cost!

How to Become an Early Riser

Getting up early has been a bit of a tricky issue for me and my wife. We always set the alarm for pretty early in the morning and usually end up continuing to sleep past the alarm.

And accidentally I came across this blog post on the webHow to Become an Early Riser. It's a pretty interesting article and by the looks of it has become very popular as well. The comments will vouch for that.

While you are on the subject, read Steve's follow-up article How to Become an Early Riser - Part II.

I am going to try and put in to practice what Steve says. And I am going to persist.

And check out Steve's blog while you are at it. Seems a pretty interesting guy!

Determining time zone a web site visitors time zone

Recently I faced a challenge to write a server side script in .NET to determine a users' time zone. This was coming from a client in UK who was having a high traffic web site and he wanted an efficient way to determine the time zone of a user. The main condition was that it could not use any client side scripting and that it had to be very efficient.

After searching the web I realized that there were no free services that provided this kind of service. There were a few that did this for a fee.

But there were a few services that provided the visitors country based on the IP of the visitor. So I went ahead and proposed a solution where the country was discovered through one of these free services or a database and then to construct a database that contained time zones and countries.

So I used the free web service at http://www.hostip.info to determine the country and then used my database to discover the time zone. this solution worked perfectly.

But the client refused to accept it because it consumed a web service. He insisted that consuming the web service will eat up his band width and that it was not feasible for him. Then I was searching around and came across the GeoIP lookup database that is being used in the DotNetNuke portal. Since this was a free database, I then changed my implementation to use this.

And I used caching to improve the performance and this was accepted by my client. Thanks Official Project Base!

It's my sweeties' Birthday

Birthday greetings to the cutest, most beautiful and sexiest woman on earth - My Wife!

Greetings from your everloving hubby!

Sent her flowers and gave her 6 cards. She loves cards! Well looking forward to gtting her a memorable present later today, cos I havent got it as yet!

Happy fatherhood malli

Today, Shiyara, my brothers wife gave birth to two baby girls! The mother and the two babies are doing well at the NineWells Mother and BabyCare Hospital.

Happy parenthood you too!

Soul Assassins

Interesting article. Contrary to the general views. The article summary reads "The employees are probably the worst thing that happened to a company".

Well I've always known that there are people who thought otherwise. People who did not agree with the popular beliefs and culture. But when those people are trying to popularize their own contrary ideas and trying to become the popular culture, now that's something to think about.

An interesting article anyway. Read it. Soul Assassins

It puts out a few bold ideas hat most of us secretly admit. Most of us are not happy in our jobs. But we are not meant to find happiness. If we are working to make happy, the work may not necessarily make us happy. Of course if you are really passionate about your work and can go on engrossed in work for days, then maybe you are one of those happy people at work.

I guess you have to find some kind of meaning to your job. If you are just in the job for the money then you would not be motivated to do exceptional things. You would just do the minimum that is expected out of you. After all, if you are going to get paid the same if your company makes 1 million in profits or two million, would you care?

I guess the crux is, different people will find different factors that motivates them. And trying to apply the same formula to all of them and expecting uniform results, will not simply work.

Reminded me of something else that I read today: " Hire for attitude. Skills can be taught."

Bored!

Have been bored since yesterday cos I couldnt get my hands "Dirty". Need to get myself involved with some coding, prefrebly in .NET stuff. That keeps my mind ticking. And gives me a purpose to spend the time at office.

Well, I just re-started to re-do the conversion of ASP.NET portal Access data provider. Hopefully will be able to get it done. But the problem I am facing is that most of the logic of the portal is contained in Stored Procedures and Access does not support that much complexity in Access Queries. So it wont be a simple translation as I expected, most probably, I will have to add to coding as well. But heck, that should keep me occupied for sometime.

BTW, it's been raining cats and dogs. ANd most of the roads have been flooded restricting traffic to a single lane at most!

Loading an image residing on a remote web server to a image control.

This has been a question posted to me on an internet site. Initially i thought this had to be simple. But then I realized, in order to do this you need to do a few lines of coding. This was for a Pocket PC application. But anyways coding would not change much for any other platform.

Here it is:

'Give the url as a string
private void LoadImage1(string url, PictureBox pb){
HttpWebRequest wReq = null;
HttpWebResponse wRes = null;

try{
wReq = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
wRes = (HttpWebResponse)wReq.GetResponse();
pb.Image = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(wRes.GetResponseStream());
}
catch(Exception ex){
string s = ex.Message;
}
finally {
wRes.Close();
}
}

It's my birthday

Today's my birthday. Geez I'm getting old. I'm 29 now. No wonder I'm having grey hair now!

Anyways, it's been a great day so far. Got a 1:8 scaled Corvette remote controlled race car. Great toy! Looks pretty much real and they have paid a lot of attention to even the minor details. Thanks wifee! Thanks for the present and for all the love you have been giving me all this time. Your the best!

Cant wait to go home. I can play with the car. Also, ammi will be coming over as well. SO we are gonna have a party!