We have also made it easy for you to share your feedback. So keep 'em coming :)
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The site uses publically available data from BigFlix and presents it in very interesting manner - check out the video to get a feel of the site's capabilities.
*Please view in HD and in FullScreen mode*
I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the following three individuals in making this site a success.
Some technical highlights that might interest you:
There was this project that was started under a lot of time pressure (btw, which project is not?). And since, success was crucial, the best minds were assembled to form the team. Considering the urgency and the need to get going fast, the team hurried through the requirements. When it was time to start implementation, it was clear that there were two distinct schools of thought on how to proceed.
The design-purists wanted to make sure that the system could accommodate all scenarios that were considered. They were also creative enough to come up with some very reasonable use cases that were not thought of initially.
The second group, guided by the principles of agile-development, was crying out - yes, you guessed right - YAGNI. They had their rational:
Now that we have reached this far in the story, let's analyze how to proceed. To make it more interesting, let's assume that the management decided to hire YOU as a consultant to help resolve this situation.
Did I hear YOU say - 'Nice try George - why drag ME into this mess'? I agree - it's not fair on my part to create a plot and put YOU on a spot?. So, I will help you by joining in the analysis.
Let's start by acknowledging that this is a classic conflict scenario. The real problem comes when you become 'too agile' or 'too formal'. In simple terms, extremes - be it over-design or under-design - are not good. You have to have a pragmatic solution.
'Easy to say George, but how do you suppose I solve this problem?'
Let's continue the analysis. It's good to know the variability in the system. After all, architecture is all about managing variability and protecting those things that are difficult to change against - well, change! But if you design the system to accommodate all possible variability, the system might become too complex. That is the time when 'being agile' - which essentially means 'the readiness to change' - helps. In fact, change can be less costly if the system is not complex to start with. So, if you cannot anticipate all variability, it might be more pragmatic to be simple to start with, but at the same time be prepared for change, the inevitable.
So, it's good to think through all possible scenarios, as a thought exercise, but resist the urge to go ahead and implement all of them. Also, being agile is not an excuse to be unaware of complexities. Ignorance is bliss, but can turn out to be costly later.
Both camps should be aware that in a solution space, there can be local minimum and global minimum. Being pragmatic is to invest time to be aware of the global minimum (with the knowledge available at that point) but resist the urge to build for it. Instead, focus on the critical few that will get you going.
'Ah ha! So I get it George, I should check with the agile camp to see if they are being plain lazy. And also check with the purists to see if they are getting carried away by the elegance of the design and inadvertently make the system too complex'.
Yes, so I conclude the story and take the author's privilege to declare that YOU managed to resolve the conflict and came out victorious. Congrats YOU!
p.s. I encourage you to read up on the following related topics - K.I.S.S and D.R.Y.
]]>More details about the event [http://www.hackday.org/]
I am looking for a hacker buddy - so if someone is interested in forming a team, let me know.
]]>I kept pushing this because of all the work involved in the migration - lazy me :-). I thought of stretching my luck by reopening the support request for one last time - Fortunately, this time, some one *did* take a look at this and the problem was resolved.
So, here I am - back online.
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Position: Principal Engineer
Position: Senior Software Engineer - QA
Position: Senior SCM Engineer
If you are looking for a career change and if you find one of the above positions suitable, let me know (by dropping a comment). I will be happy to refer you at Intuit. You can also reach me at 'mailto (dot) george (@) gmail (dot) com.
p.s. The views expressed herein are my personal views and are not intended to reflect the views of my employer.
]]>To give you an idea of how much bandwidth I am 'really' getting, I have captured a screen shot of 'Aritel speed test utility' running on my browser over my home WiFi.
As you can see, I am not really getting 8 Mbps :) Following is their tariff:
Hope this helps in making your decision on choosing a broadband provider in Bangalore.
]]>p.s. The views expressed herein are my personal views and are not intended to reflect the views of my employer.
]]>I am joining Intuit Bangalore as a Software Architect. I am quite excited about this opportunity. From all the interactions that I had so far, Intuit look like a very promising place to work.
]]>
REPAIR TABLE mt_comment
I then used MySQL Administrator (GUI tools) and selected repair on the table with the following settings.
This fixed the problem.
XBox 360 Elite is available in India exclusively through Indiatimes shopping and the price is Rs. 34,990. So my decision to buy this from Europe was well worth it.
While I was a student I used to playing Quake 3 Arena. Though I am not much of a gamer, I bought Halo 3 and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I have also taken a one month free subscription of XBox live. My profile on XBox live is here.
]]>A tool with this ease of use is needed to improve the design and code without any hesitation to refactor.
ReSharper's code navigation capabilities are also extra ordinary. You can read more about it here.
I have also used dotTrace to fix a nasty performance issue.
Overall I am very satisfied with the product.
]]>
private static readonly CultureInfo en_us_Culture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
// Parse in the format [2007-09-06T10:20:26.689093Z]
private static readonly string dateTimeFormat = "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.FFFFFFFZ";
public static DateTime parseDate(String dateString)
{
DateTime parsedDate;
bool parseResult = DateTime.TryParseExact(dateString, dateTimeFormat,
en_us_Culture,
DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal, out parsedDate);
if(!parseResult)
{
SVNErrorMessage err = SVNErrorMessage.create(SVNErrorCode.BAD_DATE);
SVNErrorManager.error(err);
}
return parsedDate;
}
The site is pretty empty right now. I am planning to get some content uploaded during the weekend.
I have also hosted the DotSVN Asp.Net sample at code.dotsvn.net.
This sample demonstrates basic functionality of browsing any subversion FSFS repository. My target is to make this as functional as bsSvnBrowser. You can see a live demo of bsSvnBrowser here.
Once this code becomes feature complete, I will be using the same for the nTrac project.
]]>ISVNRepository using the SVNRepositoryFactory
// The path to the root of an SVN FSFS repository
string repositoryPath = "file://" + "SomeValidPathToFSFS";
// Creates an ISVNRepository driver according to the protocol
// that is to be used to access a repository.
ISVNRepository repository = SVNRepositoryFactory.Create(new SVNURL(repositoryPath));
repository.OpenRepository();
2) Now that we have a connection to the repository, we can get contents using the GetDir method.
// Dictionary to receive the SVN properties
IDictionary properties = new Dictionary();
// Now we call GetDir to get the contents at the specified path
// Here we specified an empty string to get the contents of the root
// Second argument is the version, -1 indicated the latest version
// Third argument is the property collection
ICollection dirEntries = repository.GetDir("", -1, properties);
The SVNDirEntry representation of a versioned directory entry, It contains
- The Entry name
- Entry kind (is it a file or directory).
- File size (in case an entry is a file)
- The last changed revision
- The date when the entry was last changed
- The name of the author who last changed the entry
- The commit log message for the last changed revision.
3) Now we can iterate through the SVNDirEntry collection.
foreach (SVNDirEntry dirEntry in dirEntries)
{
string DirName = dirEntry.Name;
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(DirName);
}
And that is it. We can also call other methods in the repository like
// Gets the Universal Unique IDentifier (UUID) of this repository
string repostoryUUID = repository.GetRepositoryUUID(true);
// Returns the latest revision of this repository
long latestRev = repository.GetLatestRevision();
]]>