Better Software: Setting Up the Development Environment

This is first, in series of posts on how to write Better Software. The series would try to touch upon stories which would result in development of better software.

This post is about having a minimalistic development environment setup to do effective software development. As you can see in the picture we need 5 entities to begin with.

Is wordpress.com reeling under excessive user load?

I have been using wordpress.com as my preferred blogging site for over an year now. I saw the traffic of blogs being posted increase over the past one year gradually but surely. Whenever I hit the site to enter my blog site, I see upwards of 0.1 million blogs posted everyday. Pretty impressive.

However, for the past few days, I am greeted with inordinate delays in logging into my account. If at all the login somehow works, the stylesheets take ages to load.

This is how the screens look like.

Super Power’s Technology

Last week I took a break from all technology related stuff to welcome our son to this world. It is an amazing experience to see the Super power’s technology at work to create a new life.

Our son ( we are still working on the name ) came to this world on 21st Feb’ 2008 (Thursday). He had to be admitted back to the hospital for treatment of Jaundice and was discharged after 2 days. He is recovering now at home. Wishing him a speedy recovery and welcome to this world!

YamiPod: Using iPod with Ubuntu

If you have recently moved from Windows to Linux then one of the things possibly troubling you would be how to synchronize your iPod without the iTunes software.

Well the answer lies in

A relative newcomer to the iPod file management arena is YamiPod.

Download from the project’s website at www.yamipod.com.The file will appear on your disk as a tarball, so first extract the tarball, and then move the yam-linux folder, which is the product of that extraction, to your home folder.

Follow the steps to get started :

QuickTip: Android does not load my application in the emulator

I faced this problem when I was working with the Android Eclipse plugin and sometimes my application or the application changes would not show up on the emulator.

You might want to check out this link which Google has for the same problem. However in my case it was not helpful.

What worked in my case was killing the adb process. If you are using Ubuntu then goto System->Administration->System Monitor and hunt for the adb process, which would be sleeping. Kill the process and rerun your application.

On Windows you can go to the task manager and kill the adb process.

Your changes should start showing up now.

Introducing Google Android

A couple of weeks back I was at the TiE Summit 2007. There I could hardly find anyone who was not interested in the mobile space. Mobile phone space definitely is something which cannot be missed given that today the number of mobile phones far out number the number of personal computers. Also, with each passing day they are getting better memory and better computing power. It would soon become a necessity for all major e-commerce sites to offer their services over the mobile phone assuming that they are not already working on it. Apart from this there is a lot of potential for specific mobile phone applications which would help the consumer do better personally and professionally.Almost coinciding with the mobile space euphoria, Google released Android. It is a a fully integrated mobile “software stack” that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications. The important objective is to deliver a vastly improved web experience on mobile devices, equal to what people can experience on a desktop computer, in contrast to the limited functionality on today’s mobile phones.

At the TiE Summit I also heard many speakers saying that “portal is dead.” The next technology wave is dependent on the platform. Many applications and services would be built depending on the platform and a business would be successful depending on which platform does it align with. So if you align on the Android platform then assuming that Android is successful, you could be successful as an Android service provider, Android powered device maker etc etc. HTC would be launching Android powered phones in 2008.

Given all of the above I decided to check out the Android offering over the weekend and here are my initial findings

Are you ready for the Maintenance Project?

Some time back we were approached by a huge organization to maintain one of their projects. This project was not developed by us but we were being requested to maintain it.

Without getting into the reasons of why the client did not trust the original development company with the maintenance, let me instead focus on the list of questions that we asked the client for the intake. The idea is to let you know a list of questions that you should ask the client to begin the intake.

We distributed the questions into 4 categories

1. Technology
2. Process
3. People
4. Others

Following is a list of questions that we put in each of these categories.