Girish Gangadharan

My second sister Shyju brought Archith into this beautiful world on Friday, October 3rd 2008. He weighs 7.2 lbs.

More pics on my flickr soon…

That’s what I am now. An MCPD – an abbreviation for Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (Web).

I took exam 70-547 early today and scored 1000 out of 1000. LOL! Can you believe it? I scored 100%. Sometimes I surprise myself.

So this, in addition to exams 70-528 and 70-536 that I had passed earlier this year, makes me an MCPD.

Yay!

Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. So I figured I’ll post something about violence.

I know. I’m bored (and going to hell).

Stumbled upon wordle today. Gave it my blog’s url and played with it for a while. It’s pretty cool actually. When I finally got bored and stopped, here’s what i had.

Click on the image above for better resolution (Takes you to wordle)

No new features. Sorry. But this one took me months to finally get it right.

Every time i got this email from mozilla.org (contents shown below), my heart broke.

The following files of Select Search 3.0 have been retained in the sandbox by a Mozilla Add-ons editor:

Review Information:
Reviewer: Andrew Williamson
Tested on winxp with fx3
Comments: the pref exists checking you added doesn’t appear to be complete as I got these two errors with a quick test:
Error: Component returned failure code: 0×8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getBoolPref]

Source file: chrome://selectsearch/content/selectsearchOverlay.js
Line: 808
and
Error: Component returned failure code: 0×8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getBoolPref]Source file: chrome://selectsearch/content/optionsDialog.js
Line: 2977

After about half a dozen failed attempts to figure out a solution, one great suggestion by one of the reviewers (Andrew Williamson), helped me finally fix the bugs. All I had to do was add a defaults.js file under defaults/preferences folder that sets the default prefs.

I know what I’m about to say is hard to believe, but I actually have gotten quite a few emails from people asking me if I was planning to upgrade my extension and that they kind of missed it after upgrading to FF 3.0 (LOL! I swear. No kidding.) as Select Search was retained in the sandbox for several months without approval, until today. It was my fault though. I just didn’t know how to fix the bugs they reported.

I was elated and frankly relieved when I finally got this email from Mozilla today.

The following files of Select Search 3.0 have been made public by a Mozilla Add-ons editor:

Select Search 3.0 – ALL

Review Information:
Reviewer: Andrew Williamson
Tested on winxp with fx3
Comments: Looks great – thanks for the update.

Well, to all the people that contributed to the 15,513 downloads as of this second, a big thanks and here – enjoy the new version.

Ok. Before i start talking in detail about the point of this post, i’m obligated to let you know that my brother-in-law is the CEO of Innowize Software Pvt. Ltd, India, that owns and operates trainwize.com.

When i was a teenager, i remember begging my dad to enroll me into a software training course. There were only a few major players like NIIT, SSI, Aptech etc. that offered decent courses. Anyways, my dad finally agreed and spent about $800 approximately on tuition alone, when i joined SSI Tech.This was in 2000-2001, i think.

What I didn’t know back then, was there were a lot of other institutions that offered the same level of training for half the price. It was too late though. The fees was non-refundable. It was pretty sad since my dad had to borrow money from his friends to help pay for that course.

Anyways, that brings me to the point of this post. There are twice as many training centers in India now, especially in the major cities like Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad etc. And there is still a big gap connecting the prospective students and the centers.

Trainwize promises to fill that gap. It is the first of its kind web portal in India, that allows training providers to list their course offerings with all relevant details such as price, duration, course outline and prospective trainees to find courses quickly and effortlessly. It was first launched in Chennai and they are planning to open branches in Bangalore and Hyderabad very soon.

With details about training courses from training providers of various sizes and types of offerings, this portal will have the most comprehensive listing of training courses in India. Its easy to use interface and features such as ratings and featured providers will make it the online destination of choice for training seekers, whether they are recent graduates, or professionals looking to upgrade their skills.

The idea definitely has potential, given the market in India. Since this is his maiden venture, i wish him and his company good luck.

Of course! Isn’t that what the world needs right now? Yet another browser?

“Oh…we know what you are thinking. Why would I dump the browser (read Internet Explorer/Firefox/Opera/Camino/Safari) I use every day and even try yours, let alone switch? Well, here’s why. Our new browser has speed-dial! Bet your browser doesn’t have that feature….huh?”

Ok…let me stop being cynical now and cut to the chase. Who could possibly build yet another browser and actually get people to sit up and take notice?

No points for guessing it right. The correct answer is Google.

Ladies and Gentleman, Google Chrome is at your service.  (UPDATE** : Back up again. Link updated to point back to Chrome’s home page.  I’m still going to leave the link to the comic.)

(UPDATE* : Apparently not. Seems like they pulled it down as soon as the word got out. So i have updated the link to now point to the cartoon, from Google itself.)

I was actually looking forward to Android, thinking that was the next big thing from Google although it’s been in the works for years now. But this one just sneaked up on us.

I’m really curious to see if it is good enough to beat the most popular browser.

Oh….it’d better be good…

Alright Microsoft. You win. I have officially started working with Sharepoint now. I’m now one of the thousands of .Net developers that have been slowly but steadily and methodically, sucked into dark side of the “portal” world. A bunch of us in my company were hoping and praying that we don’t get placed on a project that would force us to learn this technology especially because of the horror stories we’ve heard. When someone like Rob tells you that sharepoint is the shittiest piece of software he’s ever worked on, that is saying something.

Anyways, enough of bitching. Every Sharepoint developer that i knew, installed VMWare on their machines that ran Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005/2008 and used that as their development environment. Why? Because WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 runs only on server operating systems. Brilliant! Let me get this straight. We are supposed to build applications that would run on “portal” software that are hosted on servers, and so we are supposed to do our development on server operating systems? Of course! Makes perfect sense! Yay Microsoft!

I don’t know man…i just didn’t want to load yet another software on my box and do all the configuration. Luckily for me, Bamboo Solutions had figured out a way to get MOSS 2007 to run on Vista/XP operating systems. As always, i started off my learning process by opening up a brand new word document and taking screenshots of each and everything i did, right from scratch. That includes pictures of installation wizards, “This program has performed an illegal operation” errors (sugar coated for Vista), dashboards, Visual Studio IDE, etc.

The end result of all this pain is a document that has some blurry images but decent content on how to write a “Hello world” web part and successfully deploying it to a sharepoint portal, all starting from scratch. This tutorial would make more sense if you are a .Net developer and have been doing custom application development for a while. It is meant for someone that has no idea where to begin, in their attempt to learn Sharepoint. So if you feel some of the screenshots in the document insult your intelligence, just remember that not all people are as smart as you, wise guy.

Here’s the doc in PDF – How to get MOSS 2007 development environment setup in Vista.pdf

Enjoy!

Given all the outrage over Apple’s dirty manufactured shortage of the iPhone 3G, and the aggravating activation process where the users had to connect the phone to their computers and wait for hours and hours for iTunes to establish a connection to the pool of servers, which by the way couldn’t seem to handle the traffic as people from about 21 countries were upgrading/activating/syncing their “revolutionary portable communication devices”, it may not be unreasonable if people actually end up blending their iPhones bricks as shown below.

Here’s an funny quote from Delhi Queer Pride 2008

Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai Hetero Homo Bhai Bhai

meaning “Doesn’t matter if you are a Hindu or a Muslim or Sikh or a Christian (Isai), homosexuals and heterosexuals are brothers.”

Bhai = Brother in Hindi.

Apparently, they just took an old statement Indian government has been using for decades, calling for unity in diversity that goes like this

Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai Aapas mein hai Bhai Bhai

meaning “Doesn’t matter if you are a Hindu or a Muslim or Sikh or a Christian (Isai), we are all brothers amongst us.”

We are seeking the right to love. was basically the point, hundreds of homosexual rights activists that participated in India’s largest gay pride parade, were trying to make when they marched through the cities of Kolkata, Delhi and Bangalore.

Things are obviously showing signs of changing. I knew there were gay people in India and i knew they didn’t want to come out even if they had the opportunity. What i didn’t know was that homosexuality was illegal there. That’s right. Illegal. You could get arrested for your sexual orientation.

Wow.