Chandra's Random Updates!

In MAC, the dvd drive gets listed in finder only if a dvd is present. Else it's hidden. In some rare cases, even after you inserted a drive, the disk might not be visible in finder and since there is no eject hardware button near the DVD, there doesn't seem to be a way for removing the disk. Browsing around, found the following ways (from multiple sources) to eject the disk and re-insert it: Force restart finder. Open disk utilities (Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility) and the drive should be available there. Right click on it and select eject. Command line always rocks. Run the following in a terminal:  drutil tray eject Cross posted from:  http://techieconnect.blogspot.com/2011/11/mac-dvd-not-visible-in-finder.html

Intuit has just released a product called weave for ios platforms called Weave (Nothing to do with Firefox sync app - weave). http://weave.intuit.com/weave/ Weave will ensure that you never forget a todo. Quickly enter todos wherever you are and get alerts when you have an upcoming todo. Good things I found: 1. Nice UI 2. Has a good first use experience. Kind of demo mode with the help links showing how to proceed to the next step. Hovers over the screen and helps in clicking around. 3. Does many things :). Has money in - money out too. 4. No Android app - opportunity for us to create a better one? :) Bad: 1. requires a login before start 2. red theme - different from Intuit blue. 3. Projects - might not be so common word for general users and doesn't gel with the Todo's being created. 4. Does too many things :). Differs from Apple mantra - Do one thing and do it well. Money in - money out could have been a separate product. 5. No Android app

{DRAFT} Attended Innovation educators conference at ISB, Hyderabad onApril 29th and 30th. Stayed at Hotel Ista near Gachibowli.

BarCamp Bangalore 9th edition was held in our Intuit Campus (Bellandur, Bangalore). There was a good crowd of around 250 people. Intuit, OrangeScape and FusionCharts were the official sponsors. Attended the sessions : BigTable – Why? & How? A killer Mobile App Framework – Sencha Touch Open Discussion: Smartphone Platform Wars! Would you like something new to listen to? Visualizing Government Data How you can help Wikipedia Android Programming for Desktop Programmers Also helped Saurabh in presenting the session: Android Programming for Desktop Programmers Had very informative and entertaining sessions.... Got lots of ideas and web links to check.... Eager to attend the next one :)

BarCamp Bangalore 9th edition was held in our Intuit Campus (Bellandur, Bangalore). There was a good crowd of around 250 people. Intuit, OrangeScape and FusionCharts were the official sponsors. Attended the sessions : BigTable – Why? & How? A killer Mobile App Framework – Sencha Touch Open Discussion: Smartphone Platform Wars! Would you like something new to listen to? Visualizing Government Data How you can help Wikipedia Android Programming for Desktop Programmers Also helped Saurabh in presenting the session: Android Programming for Desktop Programmers Had very informative and entertaining sessions.... Got lots of ideas and web links to check.... Eager to attend the next one :)

http://picasaweb.google.com/bschandramohan/CoorgTeamOuting#

  Finally after all the hectic work in the last 2 months, UTM team reached code complete. To celebrate it, I thought as a team we could go out for lunch. After discussing on various restaurants like - civet, bhagini, lemon grass, village, aadi, we finally chose Jalsa (recommended by Amit). So the whole UTM team - Mayur, Ramesh, pasha, Guru, Amar, Pratyash, Saravanan, Rajendra & I (excluding Nikhat) and Amit & Anand set off around 12:50 in Amit and Anand's cars. Vishnu joined us for desserts. None of us had taken a camera, so attaching the snaps from mobile below: Jalsa in on Outer ring road between Marathalli and KR Puram. Nice place with good ambience. Food was tasty too with good quantity per item. Nice place to go out on weekends but little on the costlier side.

  "And I am banking heavily on a 3rd one." - almost comes true. Though that particular application got rejected, got another one which was a spin-off of that idea approved ! ... Feels good to get so many ideas going to next level !

http://www.litmanlaw.com/content.aspx?page=3§ion=1 has a very good description about patents and it's processes. For patents search you can use - Google patent search

Okay.. .so "hope this will be the first of many" comes true ! ... Second one of my patent draft is approved for filing in US. And I am banking heavily on a 3rd one. - I had discussions with our vertical head as well as the Global business head. Let's see how things go on... 

Nice to know that Intuit is going green in true sense and instead of paper filing for "GreatPlacesToWorkFor", intuit employees created this website to articulate all the details: http://www.intuit25.com/  

Thought will share this info with all of you . ...  One of the patent applications I posted in our site got approved for next level and is in the process of filing with US Patents.  Hopefully, this will be the first of many to be done!

Feel bad that I wasn't able to do a good job in this case but then aren't such experience required to learn and become better? Not that I have changed much of my style after this particular interview :-) ! http://vijup.blogspot.com/2008/02/intuit-applied-as-fresher.html

  Happened to come across couple of posts that talked about Google Trends and how they can be utilized to check the popularity of few things: On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're Dying Bollywood Actresses: Who's Google Hot and Who's Google Not? Interesting to see how the popularity of actresses on the web really indicates the career graph... movie hits.. some big gossips about them.... some changes in their personal life has really kicked a new interest in finding about their profile :) I did the same with Intuit and surprisingly found Canada providing more web traffic to intuit searches than US. Popularity seems to have decreased but time to get back to the old ways :).. Also happy to find India being a great traffic provider :-) http://www.google.com/trends?q=Intuit Quicken , QuickBooks , TurboTax are interesting to check too... Check all together in this link !

  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mostadmired/2008/industries/23.html. Proud to be part of it :-)

  So I had been to BITS Pilani again (I never thought I would go there again after my MS project viva).... Reason: Campus recruitment from my current company.  We set off from Bangalore on Saturday morning with Question Papers.. Answer sheet (to make sure we don't goof up correcting the answer sheets given by the students). Reached Delhi at around 12:00 and then headed to Radisson Hotel to pick up the HR. We then went to a mall in Gurgaon to have our Lunch. Gurgaon I believe is in Haryana district and not Delhi (surprising.. hv to check it up again!!! ) but it looks like more "metro"ish than Delhi. 1000s of huge buildings - offices.. 100s of malls.. . well maintained wide roads. After having rajasthani lunch we set off to Pilani in 2 Innovas. 3 Techies (Anil, Jeetu, Sumeet) in one car, my PM (Balajee), hr poornima, Pranay & me in one. Reached Pilani at around 8 PM and went to Connaught place for dinner. This place is like MG Road of most cities - the on...

[DRAFT] Initially I thought it was another of those marketing strategy books... And thought of skimming through the chapters on the cab drive back home. But after reading few chapters... I believe this is totally different. This turns out to be a great read not only for the interesting things happening in each chapter but for some amazing thoughtful pointers. It's great to know the mental thoughts going through the founders as they take each and every step. Definitely creates an entrepreneur thought in you. It's quite different from the "Google Story" where you loose interest after few great interesting chapters... . U can read some excerpts from the book at Google Books and review comments at Amazon . .