Architecture Handbook..

Something cool is brewing out here: booch.com - an architecture handbook describing major software systems around the world.

(Need to go through a painless 4 field registration to see sections of the book).

Freakonomics...

Recently read this book (sample chapters: freakonomics) and it was quite an interesting read. Worth checking out.

Rediff coolness..

Rediff has this ultra cool feature where they delete your mailbox if you don't login for some stipulated period (30 or 45 days) . One would think they are playing fair when they tell you that they send you a warning mail that you are not accessing your mailbox and that you are on the borderline. The only hitch is that they send that mail to your inactive mail box and not to your alternate mail address!!

Absolutely stupid... Time to store those mails elsewhere :)!

Understanding dotnet is easy ?

Quite often we all hear statements like "I know language X, how hard is it to learn a new technology, I can pick it up in a week". Sure, anyone can learn and write a hello world application in a few hours (sic) :), but building production applications even in a technology that you know is fairly hard. This is evident from the project overrun/failures that we see all around us (some of them have non-techy reasons for failing and they are ignored here ...).

I would be surprised if anyone who was bitten by issues like this (Note: you dont need to use COM to get bitten :) ) or hangs due to thread aborts in the older versions of the CLR or subtle issues with statics and appdomains, or configuration files and appdomains or the really wierd behavior that you can experience with the dotnet loader would make a statement like "I know Java, so dotnet will be a piece of cake !" or vice versa :).

There is a significant cost to learning a new technology well enough (even discounting the innumerable glitches that new technologies come with) to ship something and it is worth considering that cost before you jump on the platform du jour band wagon.

reddy ka hai?

Heard that one of the MS guys recently went to get a gas connection. Hoping to score some brownie points, he mentioned that he works for Microsoft. The only response that the gas connection guy gave was "Reddy ka hai?". Not to be outdone, this fellow responds "Haan, B.G.Reddy" :)

Working in the tech sector with its excess of news and information noise it often feels that we are the centre of the universe. Step out a bit and you realize you are not so important after all...