November 14, 2009

Joined the wave


Hi
I too joined the wave, that is Google wave today.(Thanks to Cyriac and Ribu for sending me one invite each in an interval of two minutes :) ).
Initially I found it highly confusing and nonsensical. I had already got a few opinions of the wave being just a hype and it being a bore. But I was more interested in spending my afternoon trying out the new tool. I didn't find it to be something of interest after spending 10 minutes in it and went back to my other tasks.
Then my friend Anil popped up in Wave and gave me tips on how to use the features and we even played a couple of games collaboratively. That caught my interest and I started getting comfortable with the wave concept and interface. To my opinion both are flawed(yes I do mean it). Anyways, as with all Google products, its in development mode..(this is in Preview which is buggier than beta).
I found it to be very useful for collaborative activities,and having group chats like we have for our class group. Its great when there are a lot of people involved at the same time. Other than that, currently I don't see much of a use for this.
The extensions are cool and it alone made me stay for a while in the site.
I found the interface highly cluttered and difficult to handle.I was using my room-mate's laptop,making it even harder to move around all those windows. Also,I found out that in Chrome, the interface gets stuck when you select two waves one after the other. The number of unread wavelets in a wave also tend to change and it returns to normal only when the "Sync completed" message appears on top left.In a system with 256mb ram running Chrome, I got an error asking to stop an unresponsive script about 5 times in 10 minutes. Even while I type this, my wave interface is not responding. :D
I haven't tried Wave in FF,so I don't know if its some problem with Chrome (what an irony ).

Anyway for its initial stage,it does provide something different from the various other 'socializing' tools available out there. I wonder if it would just be another site you open as soon as you fire up your browser...Lets wait and see whether this tool becomes a communication wave or would require us to wave it goodbye...depending upon how much more value Google is able to add to its much hyped new product...happy waving..

November 12, 2009

Working with windows


Hi the linux and free software guy is working with Windows Development environment..fyi.

So,take out whatever u have to say about it.. circumstances and couple of wrong choices bring to the point. And of course a bit of bad luck mixed with my otherwise very good luck.

So,in my regular spirit of taking everything as a learning experience, I dived directly into the world of .net,c# and the work environment of visual studio. It all began with a proper .net training(which frankly took the life out of me by the 4th day of the 7 day training..)C# was fun and the power interested me.
But as the days wore on, I realised the truth that I have heard and even promoted about the evils of M$.They have built a looot( i meant it) of in-built this and that. Basically a lot of bullshit, if you stop to think how easy and sensible it would be for a developer to handle it themselves.

Though a lot of such facilities are touted as aiding in faster development,I personally feel(maybe due to my largely Linux and open source background) that it severely prohibits creativity and most importantly debugging facilities. I had spend about 3-4 hours trying to find ways to do some very simple operations on a UI component and finally gave it up and simply hid the control with another . I also find it tough to convince experienced developers in the .NET platform to adopt my crude but effective methods. I guess I do have a task of bringing about a mindset shift :D

In technical work there should be something with an art in it..something creative, else its boring and mundane ..very.Its upto each person involved with this art to keep the passion alive :D Different people have different passion in the same field,so thats not something generic to comment about with a sensible conclusion.

Do you know whats wrong with the .NET development framework?
They try to make things accessible and flexible,by providing a lot of things..finally making it too damn complicated for anyone to make any sense out of what they should and in which way to solve a given business logic problem.
And you have no way to bypass what they give, at times..coz of the closed source
tats all...makes a deadly combination :D

Thats all for now.. will be back with more info on something new.. taata