Pangea day

I fully buy the idea that the world needs more of the "we are one" message and this is a great start: http://www.pangeaday.org/

The talk that started this: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/55 . I thought this was too fluffy till I watched the video.

Visual Studio Tip

Most people don't know that devenv can be made to play well with command line automation/test run debugging. Lets say you run your test suites using the following command:

E:\temp><testexe> <args>

If a particular test fails one way out would be to open the project file corresponding to the failed test and then modify its Debug -> Launch properties and do an F5 after setting up the right paths and working directory. I usually find this tedious on big projects, so this shortcut comes in handy:

E:\temp><vsinstall-dir>\VC\vcvarsall.bat x86 Setting environment for using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 x86 tools.  E:\temp>devenv /debugexe <testexe> <args>

I usually have a batch file for the first step. devenv setups a nice project with the right working directory and the launch exe etc. All you have to do is load the appropriate code file, put a break point, and F5 to debug your code!

Startups revisited.

Long time back I wrote a post on startups. Recently a couple of friends left the company to do their own thing again. So I thought this was a good time to look back and see how everyone's doing [This is incomplete, will update this as and when i get info].

New ones:

http://www.apunkadialogue.com - Amit was one of the most ambitious and talented fellows i have ever worked with. I could not make much out of the site, but what the heck, I don't understand any of the other Gen Y stuff either :)

http://www.s3edge.com - Started by a couple of my ex-colleagues Abhishek and Venkatesh. They were so thrilled by the by the product that we have built (Microsoft Biztalk RFID) that they left the company to build solutions on top of it :)!


Companies still running:

http://www.carwale.com - This is doing great and in fact BusinessWeek has recognized Arun as one of the top 25 entrepreneurs in the Asian continent (blog link) ! This is cool stuff !!

http://www.quillpad.com - Rampi and KS keep churning out something or the other and this turned out to be a huge hit for them. It is easily the best transliteration tool out there!

Companies no longer running:

Trick question - 1

Your customer says that none of their log files show any errors, so it must be the frameworks problem. What should be the first thing to ask ?

Answer: Do they actually log their errors to the logfiles or does the code just swallow them? :). This might seem funny, but i learnt it the hard way!

Seth books

Recently came across the seth books and felt intrigued by the way they have been written. After reading some excerpts on amazon, I ordered a couple of them: Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality

They are a fascinating read (still reading the second one) and they deal with nature of religion, beliefs, nature of the conscious mind and how personal beliefs (not just the religious ones) affect individual reality in a very deep way.

If you are not too religious, and are open to considering view points different from yours about life (and death), you owe it to yourself to read these books!