Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

I come across employees with non-technical role, in a technology organization who are not even slightly technically inclined. Some examples: - One executive is responsible for sales through some specific pages on an e-commerce site. Being a sales executive, he found no reason to be technically inclined. Every time, I ask him to open the page, he will go back to an email (no google desktop used here) to locate the mail and go to the page. He gets doubly confused between a QA Server and a production server URLs. - A Manager banned IM for his team as he was not comfortable using IM. I prefer IM for short 2 line conversation. If a conversation extends beyond two lines, I would pick up the phone or walk up to the other person and discuss. - Another executive who was responsible for product merchandising and accounting of sales needed a techy to do the formula for her monthly reports in Excel. She wouldn't sign up for classes and took the easy route to the solution by asking for h...

Joel on Software Agreed for most part. Except that the restart button is essential. Even with a restart option I wait nervously every time I need to reboot the server in Virginia remotely from Chennai, India.

No, we are not getting into the debate on offshoring or bangaloring a job. Let's talk about the quality of consulting companies in general. I had worked on either side of outsourcing. It is common for consulting companies to bid low and jack up the cost as the project progresses. It is like the Chennai auto guys demanding more when you are nearing the destination. The Biz Dev team doesn't care about correctness of estimate just as the developer does not care about the correctness of code. I come across problems that could have been nicely sorted out had the developers been a bit enterprising in looking out for solution in search engines. Because of such a quality of developers, both the parties face loss. The consulting company's loss is low billed time as against the actual time taken by the developers to solve the problem. Customer's loss is on lost opportunity or on living with non-optimal systems. Consulting companies have a tight grip on Internet access and ...

Google Co-op - Custom Search Engine Looks like Google is going over-board on Search integration just like MS did with their OS integration with IE. Somehow I get a feeling that this is similar to the failed ideas like Active Desktop, push technology, HTML like interface for desktop folders etc., Google involvement in every aspect of the web can soon become a pain and a number of such initiatives are bound to be failures. I just hope Google doesn't become a web equivalent of MS. Monotony can be just as bad as monopoly.

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.