Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

The election started peacefully. All rich people of my locality decided to stay in-doors. I fished out the identity cards from a pile of junk in my book-shelf. Armed with the power of identity cards, my wife and I went to the polling booth. No video coverage for our visit to the booth as we are not celebrities yet and we had no intention of creating news there. There were some 10 people in front of us, none of them seem to be from our area. They obviously are impersonating someone in our area. The agents of the candidates were sitting in a corner of the room, obviously aware of the impersonations happening on each party's behalf. The staff manning booth didn't ask for identity cards for any of the impersonators. My wife and I questioned the officers on why they allowed those with no identity cards. We didn't get a reply. They probably were too scared to ask for them. When coming out of the polling station, a lady from our area was complaining about the presence of...

No Silver Bullet: It is obvious for someone like me who spent a good part of his career on programming. We can take just one aspect of programming - type safety. We start with C, get worried about the lack of type safety. C++ didn't help much in that part, but allowed for encapsulation for modeling objects. Java went over-board on the type checking and became a pain for simpler operations. For some thing as simple as a Http post, there may be a need to create a few objects and their inner objects and so on. My conclusion is, choose a language that will allow you to do what you want to do. This means, the decision maker has to have good knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of the languages and platforms. I still come across non-technical managers who want a design that can accommodate everything. For example, my boss wants a DB design that will allow for storing detailed information of products and also have a general solution. He suggested something like a place-holder ...

Google Docs & Spreadsheets Hmmmm - What else is remaining? Presentation? Not really as it is not that commonly used application. Online Image Editors - It is probably in the pipeline. With Ajax it should be cool to develop such applications. My personal wish would be an online accounting package for home and small business owners.

We had another round of discussion on sending newsletters aka spam. This will be followed by a few rounds of discussion on why some newsletters get into the Spam / Bulk mail folder and some don't. I ran out of energy to explain the marketing, sales and other non-technical people on why these mails land in the Bulk folder. Little do they realize that there are people smarter than them writing good programs to read the intention of the mailer. While email is a cheap and effective mode of spreading news about product information, promotions etc., depending upon emails to change the sales pattern is plain stupidity. Having a web site with good navigation, tools to easily search for products, a good fulfillment process are the keys to the a successful e-commerce site. Spam mails are not. I get newsletters from eBay and I always hit the delete button. I wonder if any of our sales guys think on how they deal with the newsletter mails they get.

World's 18th largest shoe maker Supreme Shoes Inc decided to outsource an important software development project to India's 23rd largest consulting company You Pay For It Tech. It took a few months to get past the initial contract. The investor of Supreme Shoes was away on vacation and then he went on a business trip before getting all the facts and costs of the project cleared up. You Pay for It agreed to do the project for $10K. The contract allowed both the parties to revise the cost, scope on a set of agreed parameters. Top techies from You Pay For It visited Supreme Shoes factory to do a system study. Techies from Supreme Shoes visited You Pay For It to explain the project further. At the end of one month, a new Project Manager assigned for this project at YPFI said, that it would cost close to $18K. The techies from SS where shocked and asked the YPFI to review it. Senior techies from YPFI intervened and settled the price at $12K, hoping that SS would agree to it...

I recently visited Bannerghatta National Park and went for a safari ride in an enclosed van. Everything was perfect, it was sunny, the animals were visible and we could take a few good pictures of the animals. Towards the end of the safari, the van splutted and stopped. The driver's attempts to restart the engine caused the van to shake but not start. We were in the middle of some 6-7 grown up tigers. One of them was white. The tourists began giving advices - that reminded me that everyone is getting used to the Windows way of life. Restart. After sometime, the driver picked up some courage, stopped one of the vans that passed by and jumped into it. His task was to arrange for alternate transport for the stranded tourists. Slowly the folks in the van began losing patience. The tigers got a bit curious and came close the van. All of a sudden the sunny weather felt very sultry. Kids started crying; mothers and grandmothers began panicking. Other vans passing by, had tour...

I began reading Joel's article on great design . The question is, who can do a good design for a software. There is this argument that techies are the worst UI designers. I feel non-techies are no different. To prove the point, here is a frustrating argument I had with a business head on usability and relevance of messages. He wanted a descriptive message on every error user makes in data entry. In a user registration page, if the user entered an email address without an @ sign, we were giving a message as 'The email address isn't valid.'. The same message would be shown if the validation fails for the standard pattern matching for email address. His argument was, if the program knows what is incorrect in the value, why the hell can't we give a more helpful message - like 'You missed the @ sign in your email address.' He wanted a message that is similar to the following one. 'The email address you entered is invalid. The reasons could be one of more of...