Mission Gondas: (Old wine in new bottle?)

After a year (and half!) I opened “Mission Gondas” the orkut community with the same enthusiasm and expectations! Reason: I will not disclose this now (I mean do I really need to do this?). Well drama / suspense apart; let me come straight to the point. (Hussha! ha?)

I thought why not to copy and paste the contents written under community “Mission Gondas” to my blog? Simple reason ha? So here I go …

Note: Readers don’t ask me any questions on this till my next post on the same topic ;-)

Mission Gondas : Update-1

Hi All,

Today we (AFTAK) had moved by a single step towards Mission Gondas. Here is how!
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[ 2 Sep, 2006 1530 hrs IST AFTAK NEWS NETWORK ]

Guru-Ganesh Nagar, Pune
The First and Solid step by Gondas Inc. towards the acquisition of Planet 'M' Pvt. Ltd. has rocked the city last weekend!
As per our Reuters, Gondas Inc. has purchased (Full Cash Payment) BAJAJ PULSAR DTSI 180cc on last Saturday. The Bike popularly known as 'Definitely Male' will definitely going to be helpful for Gondas Inc.s next quarters performance and horizontal growth, said market analysts.
Below are the pictures of the event. And lets hope soon Gondas Inc. will share this sweet time with all its shareholders :)

Today's Poll:
What you think, how much time it will take to Gondas Inc. to fully and legally acquire Planet 'M' Pvt. Ltd. ?
1. Less than 6 months.
2. Its impossible: Other parties are already in talk with Planet 'M' Pvt. Ltd.
3. Can't say.
Reply this mail, with your answer and the supplementary reason. AFTAK News will throw a Jumbo Party to best answer.
So hurry up poll closes by end of the day!

[
Please visit preetamp\public\news to see the event photos !
we apologies for this inconvenience as our IT infrastructure is still in its way of maturity, please bear us for some more time ... we are growing !
]

Thanks&Regards
~Preetam

AFTAK News Limited
http://www.aftaknews.com
Phone No: +91-20-25411110 (Ext: 2023)

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Mission Gondas : Update-2

Greetings to all the enthusiastic and prestigious viewers of leading news channel AFTAK !
First of all, we would like to thank everyone of you, who have participated in this opinion poll, given us a small time from your busy schedule. Thanks a lot!

I know we said that we will be declaring the results at 6:30 PM today, and you people might be wondering, its 8:00 PM now ! to be very true, we were judging your patience :)
Well the time has arrived to declare the results.

This result we will describe in a single like "Satyameva Jayate"
Yes you people are on right track.

Total votes received : 14
Total votes without supporting reason : 2
Option 1 got : 8 call it as pool 1
Option 2 got : 5 call it as pool 2
Option 3 got : 1 call it as pool 3

So the it’s a time to declare the lucky and smart winner from pool 1 as pool 1 has the majority!
And the winner is Amit Nahar ! ! !
This person is also a shareholder and acts as an Executive director for Gondas Inc. has shown a great faith in this organization. His quotes has shown that, he has a clear vision for the organization and his strategic planning is going to give the investors good returns.

Here is what he had said while inclining towards Option 1.
"To completely acquire Planet 'M' Private Ltd. legally, Gondas Inc. will first have to first completely dis-own the currently acquired Planet 'M' Public Ltd (read it as planet moon look that he is sporting these dayz). and make sure that it is replaced by a considerable amount of agricultural growth in that section :-)

Also, at the same time, Gondas Inc. (though definitely male now) is pretty low on confidence and un-willing for the much desired acquisition of Planet 'M' Private Ltd. The current stakeholders of Gondas Inc have to share this responsibility to give assistance and show confidence in the firm. The stakeholders rather than backing up, and voting for option '2' of the poll, need to have a common understanding that this is one stock which guarantees growth for sure, though slowly.

Hence, I would request all stake holders to show trust in Gondas Inc and work towards making the acquisition successful."

Congratulations Mr. Amit Nahar !

And thanks again to all the viewers of AFTAK, it’s your faith and love that had always encouraged us for our innovative ideas. Hoping for the same and more trust from you in future.

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Mission Gondas : Update-3

Well one more good news !
The board of AFTAK has decided to give a consolation prize too. This prize will be given to a person from pool 2.
Guessing who is that lucky person ... ?
yeah she is Meenal K ! ! !
Congratulations Meenal K. ! ! !

Meenal is one of the members of Non-Executive Board of AFTAK, remains always ahead to figure out the Strengths and Weaknesses of the organizations. Her realistic vision has always helped the organization to target and convert the so seen impossible dreams into reality!

About the Gondas Inc.s Shopping Spree, her vision is very straightforward and realistic ...
"There is tough, hefty (I mean it ;)) competition"

Thanks All
AFTAK News Limited.

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RTI : Disclosing the votes!

Hi All,
One small step towards supporting RTI, the AFTAK board has decided to disclose the votes received in yesterdays poll.

*TABLE HERE*

Thanks&Regards
~Preetam

AFTAK News Limited
http://www.aftaknews.com
Phone No: +91-20-25411110 (Ext: 2023)

IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology: Day 2

Day 2 was much simpler. Nahar got added to the crew and we had Afteks car ready to commute. We reached on time (though Amit was with us! hehe ... just kidding!)

First session was on Web 2.0 stuff from Ramesh Loganathan who is from Pramati. His talk on bridging the gap between desktop applications and internet application was impressive. He shared some of his good experiences with web 2.0 development. I liked that idea of “Send to Friend who is on gtalk/yahoo/msn” instead of “Send email to friend”. Rather than technology he talked on a new approach towards the product development, new perspective to user interaction (lets call it user interaction instead of user interface as we are in web 2.0! Hmm?)

Next session was from Debu again. He was going to talk on SOA chaos. He was very impressive yesterday so I was expecting the same this time. Though I don’t have any experience of SOA, I had heard about this buzzword many times when I was in CPI. Debu tried his best to keep things simple, but I guess because there was no internet available, he was unable to show any demo. Because of this I guess I was unable to get the real feeling of SOA. Debu was very patient in answering my questions here again. I liked this. I talked about my year old problem of CachedRowset with him. He assured me that he will look into this. I met Madhav Sathe who is working with Debu at Oracle. To be very frank I was very surprised when he talked with me in Marathi! He also said that he will try to help me out in Cached row set issue. Thanks people!

Chris came next to talk on offline Ajax applications. He had given demo of Google Gears. Again because of unavailability of internet he was not able to deliver more. Hopefully Harshad will consider this infrastructural issue next time!

In lunch time, I could not resist myself to go with some non-veg items. Yesterday I was successful in avoiding non-veg but this time sorry! ;-)

After lunch we were expecting some J2ME stuff. But again there is a change in schedule. J2ME session got dropped out and even Advanced Spring session was also not there. Harshad, this was very disappointing ;-)

But then I met Paulo Caroli from ThoughtWorks. He was also impressive in talking on Agile techniques. His sessions on Continuous Integration Technique and Refactoring (to patterns) were very good. Yesterday I missed his session on Unit testing with Dependency Injection and Mock Objects as this session was running parallel to Spring :( I was feeling bad about this. Anyways He said that next time when he will be in pune he will talk on this.

Agile techniques are truly impressive but I guess these will work only if we change our mindset. As per Paulo, they are actually using these techniques in their day to day life which sound encouraging to me. Worth mentioning here is I liked one of his statements “Peer pressure ensures that policies get followed” Very true right? And if we want to go by Agile way automation will be the key to success. So try to automate everything like unit testing, build, integration, use tools to refactor, find bugs etc etc. I have already started towards working out this in Aftek … let’s see how it goes :)

Last session was again dynamic taken by Chris. He talked on GWT. He had shown some demos which were good. About GWT I will just say that: if it works in all the cases then it’s good. Otherwise I will not like that its there to do only simple / small scale java projects. After hearing so much from Chris a question came to my mind: If there are UI technologies like silverlight, flex etc comming up why google is still going with javascript? Any answer (from google?)

This ended up the conference and its now time for quiz winners. Yes Chris was the person who was picking up the lucky chits. Amit was lucky to win 2^nd price for 2^nd day. Good that Aftek is lucky! And we started our journey back to BM office. Overall it was a good experience hearing from industry experts. Time will tell how we implement this.

IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology: Day 1

Oh no! I have to wake up very early tomorrow … When? … Before 6 am. Yes it’s very early if you compare with my existing schedule. But can’t help as tomorrow I have to attend a Java conference at Hinjewadi…. Thoughts like these were there in my mind one day before the conference. And sad thing was that it was a Kojagiri night. (You can read more about funny item we gave that night here).

Yes! I made it. I was there in BM office at around 7:30 AM. Thanks to Smita! She performed better than Nokia clock-Alarm :) And we left towards Hinjewadi on our bikes.

Symbiosis campus is just amazing! Needless to say that I recalled my PICT days and of course InC days to mention explicitly. After registration we had a breakfast which was good. And now let’s go to the sessions!

Okay okay … before going into each and every sessions details let me tell you that there was a Java Quiz also. And I am proud to say that we attempted correct answers on day1 and day 2 as well. I will write about the prizes in my next write up.

Our first session was from Prayank Swaroop who was from Adobe. He talked on Rich Internet Applications and Flex. He was amazing in his presentation. He had shown us the demo of FlexBook which was truly jaw dropping! As a result of this once the session got over we started discussing can we use Flex in dhg-web? :)

As there was a change in schedule for some sessions we attended Spring tutorial by Peter Thomas from Satyam. I found Thomas a true lover of Spring. After every 10 mins he was asking to use Spring. Couple of his dialogs were too interesting: “Don’t create custom frameworks anymore use Spring”, “Don’t use singleton anymore, don’t use new() in your code … use Spring”, “Spring has ended up killing EJBs”, “Hibernate people say don’t use Spring” etc etc. Long back I heard about Spring from Chirag V. I did not know Spring but Peters session has given me good overview of Spring. Now I am planning of going through it.

Lunch Time! Worth mentioning … of course if Preetam will not talk about food then who will talk? ;-) Had (a little because have to attend next sessions also!) good food. Have I mentioned that I met some of my old Dhankawadi friends there? Oh yes, very surprisingly I met Nilesh Birajdar and Bharat. Nilesh was in BVP, one batch junior to me and we were living very nearby @ IIT-D (it’s not IIT Delhi but its IIT Dhankawadi … needles to say we call the campus of BVP+PICT as IIT-D. hahaha!). Bharat was junior to me in PICT. Also I met Ashish who was used to say in my next Apartment @ Nagar. Surprisingly all these people are from Reflexis. Good to see you guys there!

After lunch we were under impression that now we will be witnessing the traditional “M$ Vs Java” war! But the speaker (I forgot the name of the speaker who was from Microsoft) didn’t touch that aspect at all and talked about the interoperability! Very good. Instead of fighting if we join the hands then we can deliver more; hmm? He talked on Office Open XML format and told us, how Microsoft office technologies can be integrated in Java platform. He also had given a small demo on Web services which was very basic: a “Hello World” web service. Further he had shown some good demos of Silverlight. At the end (no need to say) we impressed by Silverlight!

Next session was amazing! A well-known personality from EJB3 world : Debu Panda talked on “Spring and EJB3”. Wow! This is the stuff for which I was waiting for! Debu had given a precise comparison of these two technologies and very satisfactory answers to some of my questions. One question I would like to mention here: “Debu, what you say what will be there after 5 years EJB / Spring / Something else” Controversial question. And Debu answered it safely: “EJB will be there as an average project has a lifetime of at least 5 years. So EJB will be there.” He didn’t talk about Spring but said technologies will keep coming. Anyways safe answer! But I guess DR will have some better some philosophical answer to this! Debu is not only a HiTek personality but does good marketing also. I end up purchasing his book “EJB3 in Action”. Debu signed on it for me. Debu what about starting a “Debu Panda Signature Book” series? (Just like Martin!) :)

Meanwhile Preeti and Smita attended session on Wicket. They said it’s a component based server side framework for UI. That’s it. Even I don’t know about it. Will find out more about this afterwards :)
Ha forgot to tell one sad thing. After lunch Meenal was not feeling well so we asked her to go home. Next day Amit attended instead of her.
Tea Break: Though it’s not possible to get 4minar style tea here but anyways I had it ;-)

Chris Schalk from Google talked next on JSF and Ajax. He was good. Shown us many demos of open source JSF and Ajax frameworks. But after this session I was thinking should I wait for JSF 2.0? I don’t know. Maybe I need some study :)

The 1st day ended here. But there was one more drama to go. What to do with Meenals Scooty? Smita comfortably said that she will drive to BM office though I was unsure about this. To add some more "tadaka" to the situation Ashwins bike got punctured. And now Meenals scooty refused to start! Now what? As usual do not panic ... we are at Hinjewadi and not in African Jungle :) Finally the scooty started and we also found out a garage. This drama ended successfully when Smita reached home safely. Her longest ride in her life: Hinjewadi to Gadital, Hadapsar !

12th hour Kojagiri Item

No, no. There is no typo in the subject of this write-up! Keep reading you will understand it. This Kojagiri night I was expecting the typical doodh celebration at D-9. When I came home there was nothing like this. The reason from Birjoo was: “Doodh pilyanantar zop yete ani sakali lawakar jag yet nahi!” Okay no celebrations this time.

Around 11:30 PM I received an SMS from Aparna telling that how they are celebrating the Kojagiri. That’s it. It triggered me. Birjoo told me the probable place where I can get doodh. Of course if there is a will there is a way. Though Birjoo said that if there is a will there is a way but there will not be (open) dukan. Around 11:45 PM I was outside that dukan. But now there is a will there is a way and there is an open dukan but there is no doodh. What to do? Simple! We regularly drink proper proper milk from Chitale milk bag this time we will do something different: we will celebrate Kojagiri with Nestle milk powder! Done!

Next one hour was of full fun celebrating this dynamic Kojagiri. Till the end Suyash was unaware of whether the doodh is a proper proper doodh or a milk powder. This will give you an idea of our quality celebrations (or quality of Nestle product ;-))

IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology

Last week we attended a (probably) first independent java conference in pune organized by Rightrix. The conference was held at Symbiosis Infotech Campus at Hinjewadi, Pune.

DR sent 5 people from Aftek viz Me, Smita N, Preeti, Ashwin and Meenal. We all had good time over last 2 days, meeting famous personalities and learning techi stuff from them. I will write in brief about these two days of conference in my next blogs.

One more thing: As we went to Hinjewadi what’s the first thing that we did? Correct we went to see the Afteks proposed development centre! And the (breaking) good news for all of us is: Yes we have seen some giant bulldozers and cranes working over there! So be ready to get shifted to Hinjewadi within next two years! (Disclaimer: It’s my guess and there is nothing official about it ;-) )

So be tuned to cover the next two techi days!

Ganeshotsav @ “D-9 Bal Tarun Mitra Mandal”!

Yes … don’t get zapped neither reading the title of this blog nor by entering my apartment at kotharud!
Yes … for the first time in history of D-9 ... its our apartment number :) ... and even in the history of my residence at pune; we are celebrating Ganeshotsav! What I am going to write here is … how dramatically all this started and all the fun that we are having with our Ganapati …

Some time in middle of august I, Suyash and Birjoo were talking about Suyashs trip to Leh … and I don’t know how I came up with the idea of “Ganapati Basawane” at our apartment! And as usual the idea got faded out with the time. Suyash went to Leh … we got busy in our day to day software industry stuff. But in office I was talking about “Ganapati Basawane” and how we used to do this at Nagar ... my native place etc etc.

On the say before Ganesh Chaturthi I was in full swing about “Ganapati Basawane” at our apartment … at least I was talking about this in office. When I came to home I shared this with Birjoo but his reaction was not so +ve :( That’s it. Story ended. (Basically his concern was whether we will be able to manage this or not … which was very true).

Next day … as usual we wake up late … went to Charminar for tea. (Charminar is nothing but a “chay ki tapari” near shivaji putala … the actual name of this tapari is Shivneri but we call it Charminar! Why? Watch “The Angrez”!). I told Birjoo that I am going to Nagar (read this as Ahmednagar hence after :) ) as my Mom called me up for Ganesh Chaturthi. At the same time I received sms from Trupti D., “Basawale ka ganapati baapa?”. My oblivious reply was, “Nahi na … Ghari bolawale aahe … Aata gharich basawato ganapati bappa!” I was all set to go to Nagar on bike …packed the bag … pulled over the jacket … and I am ready!

Suddenly we recalled that we have to pay house rent to our landlord. Birjoo said lets go to ICICI ATM and pay the cash to landlord. We went to our landlords place. I asked Birjoo to wait in parking coz I was supposed to come within next 5 mins.

And hence after the actual drama began ….

I went to my landlord … he welcome me with a Ganeshji ka prashad asked me to wait and have prashad. We were talking about the “Ganapati Basawane” at his place etc etc. My 5 mins got over and so Birjoo came up … Yes usake naseeb main bhi Ganeshji ka prashad tha :) After paying the rent we came to D-9s parking … I said bye to Birjoo as I was going to Nagar on my recently serviced bike: pulsar 150!

Suddenly Birjoo said, “Ghara-malakachya ghari gelyawar, aka seconda sathi mala watale ki apan ganapati basawayala pahije … ” And my reaction was, “tu hech parat akada bolala tar mi bike park karun ganapati basawayala tayar aahe”. And and … you can guess what would have happened next …

I called up Mom; asked her whether we should go ahead with “Ganapati Basawane”. She said we can … just make sure that you do everything with lot of devotion and discipline. We said okay. I prepared a list of items to purchase … starting from table-top, cloth, niranjani, kalash to ganapati decorations. And we started our shopping …. (We love this)

So finally around 5:00 we started the “Ganapati Basawane” even … and … till 6:00 we were done with our first ever “Ganesh Pratishthapana”!!! As usual it was very dramatic but very satisfying. Today I really believed it all happened like “We prayed lord Ganesha and asked that whether we should go ahead with Ganesh Pratishthapana and he said yes go ahead” :)

Now for next 10 days you will see various exciting events happening at D-9: the aratis, decorations, competitions and many more cool events … so stay tuned :)

(I have uploaded couple of snaps here this will give you a little idea about the excitement we had :) ... video will be uploaded soon ;-))

Ganapati Bappa Morya ! Mangal Murti Morya ! !

Demophobia

Demophobia. They say its "Fear of crowds". I say its fear of Demo.

Why one should be afraid of Demo ? Rather who should be afraid of Demo. I will say everyone around Demo.

Hey come on Demo is not a Tiger or Dinosaur or even not a stinking sox.

Actually yes ?

• We in software industry keep giving Demos to various people; client, directors, managers, venture capitalists ... Everyone is afraid of this : We as well as They.
  • My manager asks me to setup a Demo for our Director. I and my colleagues all work hard and hard, we don't sleep the night before Demo and the next day the Director say he don't want this.
  • Next time my manager work even harder (of course this means we work hard ;-) ) and we give so called a controlled Demo. Wow ! this time it worked. After this what? Now its our so called moral responsibility to convert the Demo to a all time running, bug free system.
  • After Demo what ? My manager start preparing for next Demo. Hey man what about that bug free system that we were supposed to build after first Demo? don't know.
  • After 4 months. We have a 15MB of code for 4 different Demos! which will never work together a an integrated product.