Microsoft Virtual Server 2005

I love VMs(virtual machines). The best thing about VMs is, you need not worry about your operating system crashes. Just take a backup of your VM-Image and you are done. Screw your OS they way you want and when you are done, just restore it from the backup! Whenever your machine crashes, copy the image from backup and start working again!

My test domain has two exchange servers, domain controller and test / development machines. Exchange servers and DC run on VM and development/test machines are physical machines. On my laptop I run exchange and DC as a VM and use laptop itself as a dev machine. This has a great advantage. I dont have any dependency on office for development(except to get the source code from CVS :)). All I need to do is to start my VMs and start working from wherever I want :)

Till date I have use 2 vmwares. On my PUNE setup I use GSX and in SC I use Microsoft Virtual Sever(VS) 2005. Both of them are pretty good, though I find VS 2005 more user friendly.

The only problem with VM is that they eat up lot of resources. You really need a high-end machine to run a VM. Luckily, all the mahchines which I have are of very good configuration. My laptop is a Dell machine with dual core processor and 2 GB RAM.

That was all about VMs. I found another exciting thing- Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (Amazon EC2). If leveraged properly, companies can save a lot on machine costs. You can have 100s of machines up and running within minutes and you get all these at a very nominal price! Add Amazon S3 to EC2 and you never need to worry about your data. There are few challenges though. I will write a detailed blog on EC2 sometime soon.

Till then ....

Google dynamic spell checker

Although I am not much into fiction, but today I started off with 'GONE' from Jonathan kellerman. I was looking for 'The Fountain' initially, but since I was not able to find it, I bought this one.

For those of you who use gmail/orkut/blogsopt, did you notice a new thing in all the above mentioned google apps? Just like Microsoft Office, there is a dynamic spell checker in textbox where you write blog or write scrap or compose email. If you do a spelling mistake, the word will automatically get underlined(dotted red line) the very moment you type it! you can correct the spelling by doing right click on the word and select the correct word. This is really cool!

Apart from all these today was not a good day. Net outcome was far far less than expectation. But hey, I am trying hard to improve !

Till then ...

Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish ...

Today was a sad day for me...infact the entire weekend turned out to be a big disappointment..I had many plans for this weekend and none of them materialized and guess what .. I was sleeping most of the time..
I feel bit worried about my efficiency and productivity...as the results are not matching the expectations...I want to do more in less time...I guess things will take time to speed up..I did tried to learn some new words...searched for quality litrature over the internet...read old emails..watched inspirational videos on youtube..and read some blogs..
Time management is something which I need the most.. I have 2 more days to deliver the first phase of Lamp project and I there is still lot many things to do..

Shit happens...and its fact of life ..

I don't know if you have already seen this video. This is Apples CEO Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech given in year 2005

Men always make better friends. How much? Read below:

Friends of Women -- A wife was not at home for a whole night. So she tells her husband, the very next morning, that she stayed at her (girl) friend's apartment overnight. So the husband calls 10 of her best (girl) friends and none of them confirm that she was with them....

Friends of Men -- A husband was not at home for a whole night. So he tells his wife the very next morning, that he stayed at his friend's apartment over night. So the wife calls 10 of his best friends and 5 of them confirm that he stayed at their apartments that night and another 5 are claiming that he is still with them....

My bible...

I was very sad that I left my bible at home. But hey! I found it online. Here is the link ..http://www.lib.ru/RBACH/seagullengl.txt

Food chain and software development

We all know about the food chain. Humans are on the top of food chain. We eat chicken and chicken feeds on cereals. This can be used as a metaphor for the software development. For example, in a typical software development cycle, the first step is to gather the requirements, requirements are consumed by architecture design. Developers consume architecture to write code and develop software.

Lets extend this concept little further. Lets assume that food consumed by the chicken contains pesticide(say DDT, which is a common problem in India) and chicken also carries chicken flu virus. If we eat this chicken(not me :)), we are not only killing pests in our stomach :D, but also risking our life from chicken flu! Lets apply this to software development. What if requirements are not properly written and architecture not properly designed. Coding suffers the most !

We can extend this concept further to associate it with price. Think about the cost of treatment of the diseases caused by eating this chicken. You not only pay for bird flu treatment (say 1000$), but you also pay for the disease caused by the pesticide (say another 1000$). Total cost turns out to be 2000$. Suppose the food grains which chicken had was not polluted or chicken was not suffering from bird flu. Then cost goes down to 1000$. Same applies to software development. For each polluted step in between, you have to pay a price (time and money) to fix it!

But then there is a flaw here. In case of software development, cost of fixing problem is proportional to the level at which pollution(yeah, pollution :)) occurs. If requirements are not gathered properly, then the price paid to fix this will be much higher than what you pay to for fixing problems in architecture.

So next time when you start a new project, make sure you go do not pollute any step in between !

Good writing....

One of the main reason for creating this blog was to start writing. Its my dream to be a good writer but unfortunately, I am no where close to so called 'good writing'. :)

I have been reading articles on what makes a good writer. I think that the single most important thing is to write from your heart. Words should flow freely from heart to paper. Trust me, you can never become a good writer if you are not writing from your heart. Another important thing is vocabulary, good words make your content richer and appeasing to reader. 'Reading' is another big secret to become a good writer. Yep! more you read better it is. Just memorizing words will not help. Reading is one of the most important prerequisite for good writing. Last but not the least, practise. We all know, practise makes a man perfect !

There are many more things which go in for a good writing. For example, revise and re-write, then there are many grammatical tips and tricks which you can find over the Internet. What I have written above should make a good start.

If you think I have said something wrong, then please drop a comment. Frankly speaking, I am not satisfied with the quality of my writing and this makes me feel sad and abased. But hey! the word is practise, practise and practise!

Totally confused!

MS or MBA ....which one should I go for ?

Probably I don't have the answer for this question...Its like two sides of a coin, on one side I would like to become an entrepreneur and go for a startup. On the side I would also like to dive deep into technical research.

I think best thing would be to go for MS now and later down the line MBA (if at all required) :D