Category: Uncategorized

Managing a Web Project is a challenging task. I’m not talking about the Project Manager’s role alone. Consider every Individual in the process, right from the client to the developer.

The hierarchy below is pretty common for any web based project.

• Customer
• Project Manager
• Technical Lead
• Senior and Junior Developers

Each person has some amount of responsibility on his shoulders. And it’s not the managers and leads alone who are responsible for running the show on the whole. Even a developer must be capable of doing some Project Management from the developer’s angle like tracking open issues, working based on priority and deadlines.

While the project manager’s role is to track what each team member does, It’s up to each member to be at least aware of what is his current responsibility. It’s better that the technical status of issues is managed by Tech Lead and developers as most often Managers are meant to be tackling issues like scheduling , planning, billing etc.

I will post a few more posts on Web Project Management – a Developer’s View and a Manager’s View and a Customer’s View

The Content Delivery Network Market is hotter than ever now. The number of websites delivering content to a Global Audience is on the rise.

I came across an interesting post my Om Malik in this context.

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) has lost over $3 billion in market cap in the last one month due to increased costs and reduced prices due to heavy competition. Akamai has a presence in India as well with a lot of Indian websites thronging them for collocation. A long time customer of Akamai in India is rediff.

Just see the ping time for rediff india’s homepage

Reply from 220.227.238.168: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=62

VSNL ,Bharti, Reliance, Sify have their data-centre businesses but the costs are to high. VSNL has been there for a long time .

I would debate later on the difference between partnering with a CDN vs getting up a dedicated server cluster.

Will be interesting to watch how CDN players / prices perform in the current web2.0 scenario.

Online Video is currently booming and broadband penetration is also rising.

You must have heard of Google Calculator . You can type math expressions in the query and get the result.

Now try this link

Only Unicorn

But you will see no answer for a Bull , Ox, Rhino or any other creature

Google programmers are known to have some sense of humor.

Really funny.

I feel I made a mistake by choosing the Nokia E61i. The so called Enterprise phone does not give a damn warning when deleting all contacts when uninstalling the BlackBerry Connect software. The cost – lost all my contacts and calendar entries on the phone.

Luckily I have an old backup of my 6630 to give me some peace.

The phone does not come pre-installed with BlackBerry connect. You have to manually initiate the setup. I did it and paid the price for it.

But not a single warning anywhere. I’m afraid Nokia loosing its trustworthiness !

Its almost been 2 years with my Nokia 6630, so I decided to go for a upgrade this time.

Nokia E61i is a phone which meets most of my requirements which are as follows

• slim form factor
• plenty of connectivity options – Wi-fi, Bluetooth, IR, GPRS , EDGE , 3G ( which is not coming to India anytime soon )
• long lasting battery
• large screen
• Symbian OS
• email and browsing support

Sad points

• I don’t mind the 2Megapixel Camera which is not as good as the Sony Ericsson phones.
• Bluetooth is still version 1.2 and lacks stereo support.
• Audio output in earphones is mono. Lacks a headphone/headset jack.
• Memory card is not hot swappable.

But on the whole , I am happy to have got this phone . Much better than the 6630 in many ways. After all it’s only a day old.

Head over to FoneArena for the specs : Nokia E61i

Windows Live Writer is a really cool tool from Microsoft that lets you blog from your desktop. I have been very lazy to update my blog for the following reasons

• I have my blog open inside a browser tab in the middle of many other tabs, when I come across something interesting on some other site, I just don’t feel like updating my blog.
• I decided to give Desktop blogging a shot

Lets see how it goes. Windows Live Writer looks really a good blogging client.

Windows Server 2003 is old . Over 4 years old. Looks like the folks at Microsoft are testing out Windows Server 2008 at their main site
This was the info i got from the HTTP response of the site

X-AspNet-Version 2.0.50727
Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.0


MS Visual studio is a real memory hog. Any developer would crib about that. I just don’t want to open one instance of the IDE for each project. This cool code which you see below is a batch file which builds the solution for you and shows the result of the same.

C:
CD \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC
call vcvarsall.bat
devenv C:\projects\MySolution.sln /build
pause


Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows XP/Vista and Mac is available for download

Head straight to the safari download page

The WinXP install is about 8MB

Can’t wait to try out the new browser.

Wow the competition can’t get any hotter

I was faced with a really annoying situation today. I was tempted to try Open-Source source control after a lot of VSS and TFS usage.

I tried CVS using WinCVS.

SubVersion has become famous recently and just wanted to give it a try. There’s also a pretty Windows client called TortoiseSVN Now after moving the stuff into the repository , I saw that both CVS and SVN create directories called ‘CVS’ and ‘.svn’ everywhere inside the project. Now I wanted to FTP the files to my site. But a crazy bug bit me with SVN. I saw even the damn .svn directories being moved to the site ? WTH ?

I wanted to move only the source code and not the file version information.

This blog entry came to my rescue Shell Command – Remove SVN Folders

It’s a Windows hack which adds a context menu into Windows explorer

I modified the script a bit to add CVS removal support

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN]
@=”Delete SVN Folders”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN\command]
@=”cmd.exe /c \”TITLE Removing SVN Folders in %1 && COLOR 9A && FOR /r \”%1\” %%f IN (.svn) DO RD /s /q \”%%f\” \””

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteCVS]
@=”Delete CVS Folders”




[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteCVS\command]
@=”cmd.exe /c \”TITLE Removing CVS Folders in %1 && COLOR 9A && FOR /r \”%1\” %%f IN (CVS) DO RD /s /q \”%%f\” \”"

Don’t try these scripts unless you are damn sure what you are doing The above scripts deletes all folders named .svn and CVS in the folder inside which you call it . It will wipe off all versioning info, so better be careful