Chandra's Random Updates!

Frustrating! Getting a blog address in #blogspot seems to be real tough. Though there are no sites like droidtalk.blogspot.com or droidnotes.blogspot.com - It throws non-available. I understand droid.blogspot.com might be reserved but why the others?

Original post : @ 6/22/2010 05:04:00 PM Start from here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html http://developer.android.com/index.html has all the details.

Original post : @ 7/22/2010 03:45:00 PM I typically start office time with browsing my office mails followed by gmail and live mails . This is now invariably followed by 30 mins of browsing technical sites and I have kind of grown addictive to these: Regularly visit: http://news.cnet.com http://digg.com/technology http://techcrunch.com Few other sites I visit occasionally: http://techmeme.com http://mashable.com/ Few more which I rarely visit: http://www.techradar.com/ http://engadget.com http://slashdot.com http://thenextweb.com/ http://www.readwriteweb.com/ http://gigaom.com/ Trying to avoid mention of FaceBook , Orkut and Twitter where I spend considerable time too :)

Original post : @ 7/16/2010 04:08:00 PM In FaceBook You share a lot of technical stuff …. links relating to the work you do, company info, competitors products info etc etc…. Then there is the personal front – snaps. ..outings.. .your philosophical notes, ramblings etc etc …. Two different streams or a classification of the news stream would be a good way to get the relevant information displayed to the correct audience of your co-workers/family/friends :).. Hope FaceBook implements it soon!

Original post : @ 6/18/2010 03:45:00 PM Right most spot on the taskbar is the equivalent of “Show desktop shortcut in quick launch” Win + 1 to 9 can be used to open the application ordered by the entry in the taskbar. Multiple windows of the same application? Then the hover gets displayed. Shift + Right Click on folder gives “open with command prompt” option. press the shift key and the icon in task bar to launch one more instance of the application. Alternatives for Alt-Tab; most of us are familiar with the WIN+ tab – This displays 3D tab feature. You can also use WIN + T to display the hover windows in the taskbar. Other links: Simplified version from: http://clubhouse.microsoft.com/public/post/261c40ef-ed74-4113-a8a7-5d26c9792228 Another good one: http://lifehacker.com/5390086/the-master-list-of-new-windows-7-shortcuts

Original post : @ 6/16/2010 10:18:00 AM After nearly 9 years of being involved in desktop software development, am finally thinking of shifting to the online/mobile space. Attended a 2 week JavaEE course and planning to start learning developing on Android platform. Hopefully can shift to that domain soon. Java EE course was good but felt I learnt the syntax and “how to do” part but not the why part. Am looking for some suggestions on learning projects for JavaEE, so if you have some cool suggestions, drop it in :)

Original post : @ 2/25/2010 12:08:00 PM Surprised with the number of people fascinated by the ribbons they get on online social games on FaceBook like Farmville, zoowold, cafe world, etc., I was wondering why we couldn’t use the same and give ribbons for most effective users of the pc/laptop. For a software engineering team, we could decide ribbons for people who spend more time on visual studio or eclipse or any other development tool they work on {Ribbon: Workaholic}. They get bonus ribbons for surfing websites like msdn/stackoverflow.com {You are a technical help seeker}, if they contribute articles on web {Techno sharer ribbon} etc. Wouldn’t this be interesting to share not only colleagues but also to all your friends on the social networking site?

Original post : @ 2/02/2010 10:08:00 AM Read that the FaceBook app Farmville has more users than the “in-thing” twitter. It’s a good time-pass activity but I think it’s the competitive spirit that drives it rather than the interest on the art of farming – plowing/ buying seeds/harvesting. Even with the vehicles like Tractor, Seeder and Harvester, it’s really tedious to harvest plants, plow the land and again put seeds. There are lot of cheat sites, tricks for Farmville which suggest plant different kind of plants with different harvest times so that you won’t get bored :)… Same applies for the different dishes in café world. Well, one easy solution is to outsource it! I am sure there are tons of people who would be willing to pay a small amount for their farms to be harvested before they get withered, when they are having a good sound sleep. Read that one of my senior colleague was doing the farming as her son had to go on a school trip and he didn’t want his crops to be withered o...

Original post: My new domain – www.cmohan.info @ 1/18/2010 11:32:00 PM   Registered domain – www.cmohan.info from godaddy.com . Got a offer right now for 1.07$.. Actual is 9.99$ per year. But it means next year onwards I have to pay 9.99$ if I have to keep it :( Just redirecting my blog ( http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com ) to this for now… Blogger allows custom domain. Details on how to do that can be found here . If you are stuck, just leave a comment and I can guide you :-)

Original post @ 1/13/2009 12:38:00 PM Nope... I am not talking about "How patents works?"  google search or in HowStuffWorks.com . Some people tend to not like software patents as it kind of restricts the features being used widespread. Mostly OpenSource minds tend to believe nothing should be patentable and any new idea/tech should be reusable. Though makes sense, in this cut-throat competition world, don't see that as a possibility. Now coming to the actual questions - I am still figuring how things work in the patent world. I see some cool ideas not getting patented or then some "not-so-cool" ideas getting patented and lying with no-one using them. Should all patents be productizable? Not definitely. Swype as a product - not sure if it will definitely catch on, but atleast with the patent, it knows there cannot be 100s of imitations of that in the market or a larger organisation adding it into their product and not paying any royalty to the actual idea gen...

Original post @ 1/13/2009 12:27:00 PM Looking at the great comments - fast, hypnotical, magical, blindingly fast, love this... thought it's worth checking it out. Link: http://www.swypeinc.com/ It's a cool invention and using it might help in quick typing, but it does have it's nemesis'. It's not 100% accurate as typing (if you type correctly) as it uses some kind of data matching with it's dictionary to find the words as you swipe across the panel. Not sure you can enter Abbreviations and some code names using this mechanism. A great invention but with not that impressive dependency.

Original post @ 7/10/2008 12:35:00 PM 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 !

Original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2008/02/tips-to-go-about-debugging-huge.html @ 2/15/2008 05:25:00 PM So it's been around 3 yrs since I worked on a maintenance product trying to understand the existing codebase, layers, architecture etc. It's always easy to start on V1 products I had worked for in MT or the "Prototype" projects in MS. And now to work on a product with millions of lines of code with as little documentation available as possible & to complete it in next 3 months, it's going to be a tough task Here are some tips to go about it - Understand the usage of the product. Typical way is to behave as a customer and use the product without caring about the testcases. Learn the technology (Guys.. can u point me to a good & quick COM tutorial :-)) If you can figure out the high level modules, try to understand the gist of the modules. If you can debug the product source code, put in breakpoints, view the stacktrace (big thanks to...

Original post @ 3/20/2008 11:52:00 AM Do you listen to music before dozing off in ur bed? Do u leave Laptops On and realize u failed to switch it off before dozing off? Here is a simple dos command to set off the shutdown/log/restart of your PCs. Run Cmd. To shutdown after an hour (60 * 60 = 3600 secs), use Shutdown -s -t 3600. To abort/change a shutdown at any time, do a shutdown -a

original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2007/10/perl-script-to-find-unique-file_30.html @ 10/30/2007 12:46:00 PM I am totally new to Perl.. so this was fun writing: Invoke it with the directory you want to search for. #!/usr/bin/perl -w #Finds all the unique extensions in the current directory and its subdirectory(recursive). #author: Chandra Mohan use File::Basename; sub recurse($) {   my($path) = @_;   ## append a trailing / if it's not there   $path .= '/' if($path !~ /\/$/);   ## loop through the files contained in the directory   for my $eachFile (glob($path.'*')) {     ## if the file is a directory     if( -d $eachFile) {       ## pass the directory to the routine ( recursion )       recurse($eachFile);     } else {       ## Find file's extension    my(undef, undef, $ftype) = fileparse($eachFile,qr"\.[^.]*"); ...

original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2007/10/perl-script-to-find-unique-file.html public string FindInPath(string filenameToFind) { string Path = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH"); string[] folders = Path.Split(new char[] {';'}); foreach (string folder in folders) { DirectoryInfo dirInfo = new DirectoryInfo(folder); if (dirInfo != null) { FileInfo[] files = dirInfo.GetFiles(); foreach (FileInfo file in files) if (file.Name.ToLower().Contains(filenameToFind))     return dirInfo.ToString(); } } return string.Empty; }

http://techieconnect.blogspot.com/ A place to share all my technical learnings – code snippets, cool hacks and technical links I found useful. I will start with importing old blogs from my personal blog and the new Droid Blog .

Trip covering Chidambaram, Cuddalore, Pichavaram, Poompuhar and Karaikal. Trip Start Date: 21st Aug 2010 5:30 AM Trip End Date: 24th Aug 2010 4 AM Route: Bangalore – Salem – Attur – Chidambaram – Cuddalore – Chidambaram – Pichavaram – Poompuhar – Karaikal – Kumbakonam – Tanjavur – Tiruchi – Karur - Salem - Bangalore People: Mom, Divi and me in Ritz Jeeju, Hema, Aditi, Bhoomika, Paapa and jeeju’s ma in Wagon R. Plan was to visit some beaches – but since it was heavily raining in the west coast – Goa / Karwar was rejected. On the east coast, since Mahabalipuram and Pondicherry were done, we wanted to goto some other places. Jeeju suggested Karaikal but since my first view of that place was as a remote village- i said we can visit it on one of the evenings. So we decided to cover Chidambaram , Cuddalore , Poompuhar and the temple towns Tanjavur and Trichy on the way back! As usual we planned to start at 5 but ended up 30 mins late and started at 5:30. Divi was the last one ...

Date: 11 Sept 2010 Persons: Pallavi, Sireesha and me. Transport: Ritz Total distance covered: 140 kms.   Just after Marriage – we had been to Mauritius . Our first anniversary trip was to Kerala . Wanted to plan some good place for the second anniversary but since our cutie girl Sireesha is too young for travel (as per my wife) – we couldn’t plan to go anywhere far. Even Mysore was rejected!. Finally chose Vishwa Shanti Ashrama as we heard it is only around 50 kms from Dodballapur . This place is in outskirts of Nelamangala and infact comes before reaching Nelamangala if you are coming from Bangalore. It’s around 20 kms from Majestic. We had been there about a year back in bike and that time had chosen to go via Maddure, but since the roads were bad – we chose to go via the NH to Tumkur and take a deviation near dabbaspet. Dabbaspet is the junction where you take a turn to go to Shivagange . Roads were okay and we reached the place in about 1 and 1/2 hours. This was a ...

Was searching for a mechanism to remove the linked gmail account with my office android phone. As per the link below – only solution looks to be to reset the complete mobile by clicking on Factory Data Reset! :(…. Not sure why this restriction has been placed. Why can’t I change my gmail id? http://androidcommunity.com/forums/f29/is-it-possible-to-change-your-linked-gmail-account-or-do-you-have-to-do-a-phone-reset-5718/

Driving a new car for the first few months or an year is always a pleasure especially if it happens to be your first car! The first few mini/micro accidents – you tend to ignore and think scratches are part and parcel of the learning experience. But as days go by, it certainly plays on your mind! Driving from Bangalore to Dodballapur was always a mission for me – Target to reach the ~60 kms in 1 and 1/2 hours. Upto Yelahanka was a slower traffic one but once I crossed the town limits, used to do even 150 kms on the state highway. Risky but it was all fun! Was aggressive driver – honking away to not allow any vehicle stealthily join my lane ahead of me or not maintaining sufficient space between the next vehicle for others to sneak in. But too much of travelling has it’s effect and I no longer have the energy to fight with the auto-rickshaws to not sneak into my lane or bikes to criss-cross at their own will. Stay at the right most lane – has the least chance for people to fight and c...

http://droid-notes.blogspot.com/ A place to share all my learning on developing apps for Android and using a Android phone. My last status update in FB related to this: Getting a blog address in blogspot seems to be real tough. Though there are no sites like http://droidtalk.blogspot.com or http://droidnotes.blogspot.com - It throws non-available. I understand http://droid.blogspot.com might be reserved but why the others? Luckily droid-notes was made available :)

  Tried Gist beta - started out as a contacts manager but as I added various social networks became more and more of a aggregator. Nice UI but looks common to many more apps already out there. Gist - Organize, Connect, and Communicate with contacts from your entire professional network. www.gist.com Gist provides the only full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating a rich business profile for each one that includes the most news, status updates, and work details.

This happened in our layout a week back :(... Fear is visible in everyone's eyes in the layout ! Hope the police do something about this!   Fear stalks the edges of City After spending a fortune and constructing dream houses, Bangaloreans residing on the outskirts of South-East, especially off Meenakshi temple, Bannerghatta Road are living under constant fear of being robbed. Association members have been very pro-active though and lots of suggestions and flyers. Important Self-Serve suggestions from the EC members: a) Keep your front and rear doors always closed and latched. b) Before opening the door, make sure that you know them well. c) Use peeping eye on the doors. d) You can fix steel doors and keep them secured, whereas the wooden doors can be kept open a little. e) You can have a dog (not small pets) at home if acceptable. f) You can have CCTV/Burglar alarm and kept always in ON position. g) Always re-verify the information, especially if you are called ...