Like many engineer I am partially fueled by the engineers angst. I am not always able to vent it in code and sometimes resort to sending really dumb emails :). I figured out that I can tolerate delaying sending my emails over having to smack my face every other day. Basically all emails I send is delayed...

Let me start by saying that using mm-dd-yyyy is just plain wrong. No really it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Neither does it make any sense to most people world-over if you go my the date-format map up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date_upd1.PNG If one uses dd-mm-yyyy it makes sense because...

I am sure everyone has read about the “you cannot possibly pronounce or spell” volcano in Iceland throwing up in the air and screwing up the entire flight system of this planet. While most people were reading about it from the comfort of their home I was doing the same while waiting in airports with...

Working in the developer division is very exciting because I can relate so well with the customers. However, that is also an issue. You relate so well that you tend to evolve some strong opinions that can cloud your view. While working in the Visual Studio Team System team and now in the .NET Compact...

5 years back exactly on this very day I walked into Cyber Towers office of Microsoft India for the first time. If someone asked me at that time how long I plan to work for Microsoft, my answer would’ve been couple of years max. I was still a bit suspicious of the evil empire and it took some time for...

I was just listening to Scot Hanselman’s podcast where he interviews Joel. They talk about how most bloggers get known for one post. E.g. Joel is known for “ The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) ”. Now obviously...

I’m no Scot Hanselman , but even then I guess I can share at least one tip for delivering technical presentation that has worked very well for me. At the very beginning of your presentation always have a slide clearly calling out what the attendees will “Take Away” and what is the “Pre-requisites'” of...

I rarely blog about a photo but this is an exception. Scott Guthrie our Corporate Vice President for .NET Developer Platform was here in Hyderabad on a visit to Microsoft India. I had a chance to attend a bunch of product reviews and  meetings with him. Every person in our division and outside is...

Today Boing Boing had a post about the Cupertino effect in which spell-checkers erroneously change valid words. I had worked on Adobe Acrobat and Adobe FrameMaker 's spell checking feature and do happen to appreciate the headache with getting them right. I face Cupertino effect most often while typing...

I generally take my work very seriously. However, the following from SICP was still my favorite quote " I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every...

This is my new office setup. I have been pushing around a lot of code lately and felt I needed more real-estate to effectively do what I'm doing. So I hooked up another monitor. All  3 are standard HP LP1965 19" monitors. However, since none of my video cards support 3 monitors and I have a...

Last two weeks my cell phone got assaulted thrice. First it was someone sending me a virus over bluetooth (a sis file actually). This happened when I was taking a photograph of my daughter with the cell phone camera in a restaurant (Aromas of China, City Center mall in Hyderabad). The next one was bluetooth...

Our team just moved to a new building in Microsoft India campus. A lot of people were going around checking out other people's office. I got asked couple of times about my workstation layout and thought I'll do a quick post on that. Like most people in our team I use a dual monitor setup. Last...

It literally rains email at Microsoft (if you've been to Seattle/Redmond you know why :) ) I've always struggled to keep up with the email in Microsoft. When I joined I was stunned with the downpour. The number of email I got on the first day was more than what I got in a month in Adobe. The situation...

  It's been a drag maintaining two blogs for some time now. So going forward I'll shift to posting only on my personal blog. I'll be cross posting for some more time and then stop this blog. The new address is: http://geekgyan.blogspot.com/ Point your aggregator to: http://geekgyan.blogspot.com...

Once upon a time a kick-ass developer I knew told me that a good developer needs to be multi-threaded and run the following threads The main worker thread : This is the one used to code up 3-tier applications for your employer. This pays for the rent and for that fancy big car. The core thread : This...

I've been working for some time in Visual Studio Team System (first on the TFS server and then on the testing infrastructure). I was looking for a change and then I happened to talk with the GPM of the .NET COMPACT FRAMEWORK team. The following explains in brief what followed... ... and so I landed a...

For starters it doesn't include C++ or C#, even though your mom codes in it :) ... A lot of people speaking English natively forget the importance of mother language due to its predominance. They take their language for granted. However, each year a bunch of languages become extinct, the latest being...

Someone saw a message in their Team Foundation Server history which was " Edited by God " and asked how is this possible on the msdn forum . Someone actual read my blog (or some other's but I tend to believe mine 'cause I'm linked in that page) which shows exactly how to do that. So now I have a poor...

For the last couple of days a vast majority of the movie that I'm seeing is somehow landing in Africa. Since I didn't choose any of them ( Amit did), it wasn't a conscious decision. Example include The Interpreter , Blood Diamond , Duma . In all of these movies African music is used in the background...

Windows gives examples of "Kitchen Computer" or "Mary's Computer" for setting the name of a computer ( Computer Name tab in System Properties ). But I'm sure that most people don't name their computers that way and show off a bit of creativity in it. Previously I used to use names from Asterix like GetAFix...

I care a lot about the nice nifty features that takes a software from being just a good software to a great software. It makes me feel that the developer really cared. I know how features are cut and these making it to the product indicate a mature, well thought-out execution. Joel in his How to demo...

So Amit pointed me to this post on Coding Horror (I didn't get time to read any of the feeds for the last 2 days!!). It's about colleagues playing pranks with folks who leave their computer un-locked. I myself have done couple of these stupid but amazingly successful ones like taking screen shot of the...

Today is world teacher's day , a day dedicated to some of the most important people in our lives. For me this is even more important because I come from a family of teachers including my father, grand mom and a lot of my uncles/aunts and even my wife. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all my...

If you visit the Indian Railway site and press any of Ctrl/Alt keys it pops a message " Sorry, you do not have permission to press the key ". Hey, it's my keyboard and I have all the permission in the world to press whatever I want. This is exactly like one of those WTF finds.