Sunday, November 8, 2009

Coding Bullshit Meter (Outlook Addin)

I thought this will be fun. We developers often get some mail from corporate management, which are completely bullshit to us. How much bullshit it has?? Lets calculate? To calculate I have created a small outlook Add-in (plug-in) which will Display the bullshit percentage on the ToolBar when you select the mail item.


Some of the keywords its uses to calculate the bullshit is this


synergy,strategic fit,gap analysis,revisit,bandwidth,best practice,bottom line,hardball,out of the loop,benchmark,value added,proactive,win-win,think outside the box,fast track,result driven,empower,knowledge base,total quality,quality driven,touch base,mindset,client focus

This is the first time i am developing any kind of Add-In for any application. I used Visual Studio 2010 (beta) 2010 for developing.

You will get many problems,  when you will develop an outlook plug-in. One of the biggest problem I faced was that "Event of 'Item selection change' was not firing".
this.Application.ActiveExplorer().SelectionChange
I finally come to know that you need to keep a reference of the ActiveExplorer all the time in the class.

Ok, this trick worked!!!

Download Source Code Here

I am not creating installer for this (or any kind of set-up). If at all you want to use this, please download the source code and compile on your machine. You might need Visual studio 2010 for this.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Simplest Way to Add code review using CodeCollaborator

One of the simplest way to add code review is by doing a diff on 2 folders. Where Folder1 Contains the previous code and Folder2 contains updated code.

Unfortunately the documentation was lil messy and I was not able to do it.


Here is simplest simplest example.

Use command line client of Code Collaborator and type this command
ccollab adddiffs new  Folder1 Folder2

Instead of new, you can write the review number which you have created at your server.

ccollab adddiffs 12345  Folder1 Folder2

I had problem about this, so posting here. May be this will help you as well.

Good thing is smatbears people are on twitter and they helped me.. Thanks guys.


Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Bungee with BungeeAmerica (on The Bridge to Nowhere)

Yes, I am talking about my life time experience of bungee jumping which I did with company called Bungee America.





How to get reservation
--Call them (310-322-8892) and follow the procedure

Experience

  1. Bungee Jumping is awesome, I jumped thrice.  But jumping with bungee America is even cool, because you are 100% safe.
  2. Before reaching to bungee spot, we hiked 5 miles in canyons(deep inside San Gabriell mountains). that was really cool. In-fact I hv never done any hiking like that before. Hiking on the trail, was really adventurous.
  3. First we all reached Azusa, 6th street. From there we drove our car to last parking deep inside the San Gabriell mountains.
  4. From Last Parking lot we all hiked to "Bridge To Nowhere", which is a 5 mile hike, and you will cross the river 6 times. So our shoes gone wet (we all were in Bermuda Pants). This hike takes almost 2 hours of time and very tiring, though there are no steep slope.
  5. We all had our lunch with us, because there is nothing you will get there to eat.
  6. When you will reach there everyone will be excited & when you will go for bungee, everyone will cheer you up. That is cool, because when you are going for something like that you need support of crowd.


Photos
Here you go FullScreen
(Photos are mapped here)
Note: Azusa is a place near to Los Angeles, CA

Friday, October 9, 2009

Small Lil Updates

Not finding enough time to update my blog.
Here is something, (when u don't have anything to read from my blog.)



[Currently I am on a official trip, Here in San Diego,CA. Hectic Schedules]

Thanks
Keep reading my blog.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

What a software engineer can learn from YSR’s death

[Background: YSR was Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh (state) of India. He died in a chopper crash.]

One of the reason media figured out for YSR death is “he ignored safety processes/guidelines, and he influenced the aviation staff to fly during bad weather condition”.
Now question is whose mistake??
Is it the mistake of CM to influence staff who takes care of safety guidelines? Or it’s the mistake of staff that he got influenced???
I believe it’s the mistake of staff.
Very often this happens in software industry as well, we are given some tight schedule and we are forced to finish it. How you act in such scenario?? Mostly we try to finish that within deadline and we skip essential steps e.g. we skip unit testing, we skip code reviews and all of above we tend to write quick and dirty code.
Before doing anything like that you should ask a question to you.
Which is more dangerous?
· Refusing to work on tight guideline?
· Or writing quick and dirty code, and skipping process guideline?
Act accordingly!!
I personally refuse to work on tight guideline many time, because I think that might annoy my Boss for a moment but when something will go seriously wrong after product delivery, it might annoy whole company.
[sad about the death of a mass leader]