enginerd

Go to Google. Key in sania mirza blog as the search keywords. Look at the first result you get. I am thinking of a new title for this blog already ;)

Imagine implementing a queue and not a stack on a user's access to a public wireless network that only supports a maximum number of connected clients. So if you are a user of thie Bumpnet network and decide to connect, then the user who is currently first on the queue will be "bumped out", ie., will not have access to the network! From Bumpnet Home : ...the focus of the project is to determine if by attaching simple rules to communication infrastructures, the method and manner of connectivity and behaviors of people connecting will change over time.

It is a wonderful feeling meeting your deadlines, let alone beating them! The project I am involved with is more or less complete. We( I and my partner,) are quite satisfied with the way it has evolved. There were some hiccups when in the middle, the bosses here wanted things to be done in a way that we were both not comfortable with, but finally it has turned out very well.

With every passing day here, I am getting more and more convinced that designing a good interface is alien to most programmers. The biggest hurdle I feel is the reluctance of people to accept that a simple and neat UI can also be eye catching, besides scoring high on usability scales. All people seem to want for their next-killer-application is an interface that is snazzy, loaded with tons of pictures and lots and lots of icons (never realizing that icons without labels, are the biggest nuisance in most cases.) You give them this and you're a cool designer. You come up with something simple and neat, and you're just a useless hiring!

Something has been baffling me for a while. Why do developers, using the MVC framewok, check for user authentication on a JSP (which is supposed to be a strictly view component), and not in the Controller???

Sania Mirza and this blog share a very special relationship. No not because she is a contributing writer or a guest editor here, but simply because of the number of hits she has attracted to this blog! There was a time when people in counts of hundreds would be here looking for sania Mirza pictures or biography and stuff! The number has declined somewhat recently but still the number of people who drop by on The Enginerd looking for Sania Mirza continue to amaze me. I mean, alright I understand India's obsession with its posterboy cricketers is on the decline and we're looking at alternate heroes like Narain Karthikeyan and Sania Mirza but there has to be some limit to the importance that we attach with them. The whole nation made Sania Mirza sit on its shoulders and all she did was to excel a bit more than all her predecessors did! Everyone in India suddenly believed that we had found a world beater! What did she do? a) Won a WTA Title, b) Reached Round 3 at Australian Open...

Thomas Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, is already at the top of NYT best selling non-fiction list! From The Indian Expres s : Indeed, there is a huge famine breaking out all over India today, an incredible hunger. But it is not for food. It is a hunger for opportunity that has been pent up like volcanic lava under four decades of socialism, and it’s now just bursting out with India’s young generation. Reading the article this morning, I wondered where will this hunger eventually lead to. We are a nation of young people with more and more entering the so called productive age group, and that too, at time when the rest of the world is greying. One cant deny that all this is creating more and more opportunities for the people, but the hard reality remains: the opportunity seekers outnumber the opportunities available by factors in digits not single, giving rise to levels of competition unprecedented, stressing out the very generation that is expected to propel itself and India...

I was wearing a red shirt yesterday. And yet achieved nothing!

The slow startup of Firefox browser after long periods of inactivity, like minimized window or other, may become history soon! This will be fixed in Firefox 1.1 as Brendan Eich marks it as blocking 1.8b3. (via minghong )

Morse Texter lets you key in your SMS in Morse Code.