Though many disagree, and think of software development as a mundane, non-creative task, as Kevin Carlson@DDJ puts it aptly, it is a work of art!

“I suppose the question is this: “where are the limits of the scientific approach in software development?” I mean, we are, ultimately, talking about an act of creation” - Kevin Carlson

(note the nested quotes! )

Many of my non-IT friends have asked, how I keep myself interested and how I stand to sit (pun intended) in front of the PC for such long hours and not get burned out?! The reason for this question is partly, I guess, because not every developer that writes software, thinks of it as an art form, and hence most software automate mundane tasks .. users often do very boring stuff with computers .. stuff like filling forms, writing email etc.

For me, development has always been a joy. The sheer magic of creating something out of a void! Seeing an application morph from a bunch of requirements into a working product, and addressing the needs of a set of users (the users feeling their needs are addressed) is perhaps one of the greatest feeling one can experience.

It has been my good fortune to have done (atleast a little) good work in the last half-decade. Hope many more of such half-decades are yet to come.

Oh yeah! Managers, please stop trying to over optimize your estimation techniques, remember: An artist needs space; A team of artists, need space, time and money!

[tag]software development, blah-blah[/tag]

Nice idea this one. So, here is my list

Chennai, TN*
Pondicherry, PDY^
Bangalore, KN*
Delhi, DL
Madurai, TN
Kodaikanal, TN

^- weekend visits
* - multiple times (weekdays)

I have another idea. A chronologically organised milestone-events list for a year. Maybe that will take some time to compose! Good for another post eh?!

I just downloaded Windows Live Writer

At first look, it looks good! I haven’t been able to say that about most Microsoft products off late. The last product that was awe-inspiring was perhaps VC++ 6.0 (such wide range of features), IE 6.0 (it was big deal when it came into the market) and maybe, to some extent Office 2003 (a lot less buggy and smaller file sizes than previous releases).

It is perhaps one of the few blog editors that provide an intuitive interface for adding links and particularly images. This is feature alone is reason enough to use this editor. (That is how painful, other editors tend to be).

I have a personal blog, using wordpress as my blog-engine, and would like to store pictures on my own server, that uploading them to some service that decides when to throw my stuff away! Live writer a is pleasure to use in this department. Just select your image, using the all too familiar File Open Common Control, and insert it in your post.

Inserting the above image, took just a coupla seconds (finally, I can do something useful using a M$ product, and I can do it very quickly too - Note to developers of M$ products - sorry about being soo sarcastic, but that is how exasperated I am using products that are way too generic. What we need these days are very focused and compact solutions, that don’t attempt to solve a zillion use-cases using a single product)

Some of the kewl stuf that can be done with Live writer and I’m talking just image manipulations! (Stop it with images!! … Can’t control it ….. Need to write about other features too!!)

Images - a lot of very kewl and easy to use options

Custom:

Small:

other sizes include medium and large, whose dimensions will be coerced based on the wordpress theme that you have. I use K2 and it tries to fit the image by shrinking the width.

A few more effects…

normal                                        B & W

Sepia                                         Warm Color Temp

Cold Color Temp                         Color Pop

Sharpen                                      Gausian Blur

Emboss                                       Watermark

Maps - Another kewl set of features. However intergrated only with Microsoft live services

Homestead, Milpitas - Map View

Homestead, Milpitas - Bird’s Eye View

Homestead, Milpitas - Statelite View

Having joined Novell recently, the opportunity to learn a bunch of new development skills has come up. Novell products make extensive use of the mono platform for applications development.

After 4 long years, I find myself in need of re-learning some windows application development. I tried setting up mono on my windows pc, and encountered some peculiar issues. I had installed mono and then went looking around for an IDE. Well, monodevelop sounded kewl, and tried to get in compiled on windows. I found that I needed to setup cygwin if I need to build it, and another 100 MB download is not what I wanted to be doing.

So I pulled Sharpdevelop 2.1.0, (monodevelop was apparently forked from sharpdevelop), off here, and I installed it. As per the instructions found here, I tried to compile the application, but SharpDevelop, threw a twister at me. It said “mono is not installed”. I tried hunting around for some options somewhere that told SharpDevelop where to look for mono, but was able to find no help.

Well, I did get it fixed. All I had to do was re-run mono install.

Aparently, the order of installation of the IDE and mono is:

1. Install the IDE
2. Install mono

I always thought that it had to be the other way around. Nice curve ball that one!
Anyway, here’s the very first application that I have written in C# running on Mono!