TechTantra

What constitutes a useful tweet?

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:31:00 +0000

So we've all come to love those random tweets flowing all day long... getting insight into the lives and activities of other users on the internet. However random these tweets may be, we, along with many commercial businesses are fixated on this phenomenon. So what in your opinion constitutes a useful tweet?

A smart comment?
A good link?
A self promotional tweet?
A fact picked off of an encyclopedia (aaa.. wikipedia)?
Someone's factual everyday activity?
An "A lister's" random comment?
A celebrity's agent's blurbs?
A blogger informing us about a new post?
A tweet informing us of someone in peril?

So what are your thoughts? What constitutes a useful tweet?

How twitter is causing loss of productivity

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:32:00 +0000

Currently on the internet and on cable news networks there is a frenzy over social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. While all the social interaction between millions of users is good for these companies and might be useful for the internet as a whole, for the employers this could prove to be a big black hole. Lets examine where social interaction was on the internet earlier and where we are now.

First there was email. In the beginning it was very useful and still is but it quickly overwhelmed users with spam. Nevertheless, it became the official choice of business communication. Email is convenient, but not very interactive. My inbox is still crowded with emails from colleagues going back and forth over a requirements document. Every single day a company loses some productivity when employees spend time reading and writing emails. It has become the norm though and it is here to stay.

Next there were instant messengers. They require much less effort compared to emails and provide instant communication. Again, businesses were initially reluctant to allow such use since each minute an employee spends using such tools is a minute that real work is not being done. Things changed as employers opened up to corporate IMs such as Microsoft Communicator and Lotus Notes, but even today many employers block IM usage altogether.

And next there were social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace. These sites have the ability to suck up a user's time doing ultra unproductive social things like "Liking" a goofy comment a friend made on a picture. Most employers have rightfully blocked these sites on their networks. Things are changing though. Some employers in sales, advertising, "social media" and even real estate are promoting and encouraging the usage of social networks to gain clients. Whether such unsolicited connections work, remains to be seen.

And then there was Twitter. This is a whole different ball game. Twitter is a very simple concept. You just say whatever you want to say in 140 words or less and you connect with people you choose to connect and they do the same. So, as you "follow" more people and broaden your network, you start receiving more "tweets". This is a great tool if you follow people in moderation. But with the crazy cable news networks declaring it as the savior of everything and having competitions to get to a million followers, and twitter showing the number of users following you on your page, you are under constant pressure to keep growing your network. On top of that you have desktop tools like Twhirl that pop up all the new tweets you recieve from your army of follows. However irrelevant these tweets may be, they have the tendency to constantly get your attention and suck you up into reading them and clicking links you would probably not click. This may cause a huge loss in productivity. Some employers are waking upto this and blocking twitter access within their networks. Then again there are others within the sales, advertising and other such fields that are rallying their employees to get on the twitter bandwagon.

In my opinion, twitter is a great tool but following thousands of users does not make much sense unless all you want to do is promote yourself or your brands across a large audience. What do you think?

Twitter riding the rollercoaster again!

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:38:00 +0000

Well Twitter is down again and has been down for over 10 minutes now. Their status blog doesn't say anything about this yet and don't suppose it will. Already miss the constant stream of Twitter messages popping via Twhirl :(

10+ applications that ask for your twitter passwords

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:41:00 +0000

A lot has been said about Twitterrank starting with this mis-informed article on ZD-Net. At least they gave Twitterrank creator Ryo Chijiiwa a chance to explain his side of the story. Its always a bad idea to give out your login credentials and its amazing to see how cavalier people are about it when it comes to these "social" applications/mashups.

Lets take a look at some applications that ask you for your twitter passwords:

TwitterRank - Gives you your vanity rank.

TwitterFeed - Sends out a tweet at short intervals every time you update a connected blog.

PollDaddy - Quickly create a poll and post it as your Twitter status.

Twitterator - Allows a Twitter user to "follow" a bunch of other Twitter users in one fell swoop.

My Tweet Map - This tool shows you the latest tweets from your friends on a map.

GroupTweet - Allows you to post a private message to a group of Twitter friends.

Twibler - Automatically posts your new eBay listings to your Twitter account.

Hahlo - Gives you a separate profile page and the rest of the Twitter features in a new look.

My Tweeple - Allows you to manage your friends and followers in Twitter on a single web page.

Twitter Karma - Flash application that fetches your friends and followers from Twitter and displays them for you, letting you quickly paginate through them.

AWeber Communications - Allows you to automatically send out a tweet whenever you create a broadcast email marketing message in AWeber.

How to set up your Blogger custom domain with GoDaddy

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:23:00 +0000

I have just switched my blog from Blogger's blogspot sub-domain to my custom domain techtantra.net. I had initially read Blogger's instructions to switch to a custom domain. It seemed simple enough, so I went ahead and bought the domain from GoDaddy. I followed Blogger's instructions to the dot and waited as they said it would take time for the DNS settings to propagate over the internet. So far so good. But, after waiting for over two days and still not being able to access the new domain, I decided to delve a little deeper. Turns out Blogger missed out a few steps in their instructions.

So here are the modified steps I followed to get the custom domain successfully setup:

1. Log in to your account at GoDaddy.

2. Click "Domain Manager" under "My Products" in the left navigation menu.

3. Click the domain that you would like to use with Blogger.

4. Click the "Total DNS Control And MX Records" link under "Total DNS".

5. By default GoDaddy gives you a parked page and creates an "A record" for it. So under the "A (Host)" top section, select the A Name entry and delete it using the button on the right.

6. Under the "CNAMES (Aliases)" section, again, by default GoDaddy create a CNAME with host NAME as www pointing to @ (your domain). To edit this, click the pencil icon on the right. In the edit box, enter www under "Enter an Alias Name" and ghs.google.com under "Points To Host Name". Do not modify any other options.

7. Under the "CNAMES (Aliases)" section, click "Add New CNAME Record". If your domain is www.mydomain.com, then in the add CNAMES box, enter mydomain.com under "Enter an Alias Name" and ghs.google.com under "Points To Host Name". Leave the default TTL option. At this point your Domain Manager should look like this:

Now all you have to do is wait and allow the DNS entry to propagate over the net. Once that is done, goto your Blogger settings and under Publishing click the switch to a custom domain option. For anyone moving to a custom domain from Blogger, hope this helps in making your transition less painful than mine.

Facebook, Windows Live Hotmail interface change

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:05:00 +0000

People tend to get used to an interface and way of doing stuff on websites. Once this sets in, they usually can't take change very well. Resisting change is a natural tendency in many aspects of our lives, but griping and grieving about "interface changes" or other superficial changes on a website is really lame.

Take some recent examples:

Facebook profile pages were getting too cluttered (= MySpace) with apps and growing walls. So they decided to move to a tabbed structure so that the profiles were better organized, less cluttered and loaded faster. These changes should have been appreciated by the users, instead there were complaints from many quarters as noted here.

Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail had the best interface among all the free, web-based email providers, but it was crammed with lots of images and scripts slowing it down to a crawl. So they too decided to listen to user feedback and came up with a new interface as shown here.

This new interface still looks great and is much faster and lighter than the older version. It even works flawlessly in Google's Chrome browser (the older version did not). So again you would expect users to be excited about the change and appreciate it. Instead you get a whole bunch of users who as always hate the change and threated to quit using the service. Some even complain, as noted here, that the change was unannounced which is not true. Microsoft had sent emails out about the change on Thursday, October 09, 2008.

So, apparently for the "net-obsessed, over-twittered, facebook/MySpace time wasting users", a huge CHANGE in the political sphere is acceptable and cherished but superficial interface changes on websites are too much to digest!!

Building a Software Project Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:27:00 +0000

Building software is hard, especially enterprise software applications that serve thousands of users and run huge businesses. These applications are typically highly distributed, connect with several other systems (including legacy systems), have several failover strategies, automated error detection and recovery, roll-back/roll-forward schemes, have critical data being synchronized at several locations and the list could go on.

Again, building software is hard. Building a project plan with resource estimates to build the software is equally hard and error prone, especially when it is done without taking input from the technical team. Very often you see Project Managers coming up with a plan and getting customer approval without any input from the development team. This is a very bad idea. This often causes project delays and budget issues leading to project failures. Additionally, this causes unnecessary stress all around and may lead to lower morale in the development team. Resource estimation for software is very different from estimation for other fields. For example, to build a house, you get a contractor and specify what you want. The contractor gives you an estimate for cost, time, etc and more often than not the work is done within the estimates. The same cannot always be done for software. This is mostly because of improper estimates being made by the non-technical managers.

Building a project plan for software applications needs to be done with great care, taking inputs at every detailed level from the development team and adding buffers for each resource. A Project Manager or even the Architect may not always be the best person to decide the estimates for a given functional unit. People in these positions typically do not touch the codebase and may not have the best idea about what it takes to build the modules. So for all the Project Managers out there - for your next project, take inputs from the development team if you would like to lower the risk of project failure and instill a level of responsibility into your development team.

New Windows Live Hotmail being rolled out

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:41:00 +0000

The new modified version of Windows Live Hotmail is being rolled out in phases it appears. This is the screen presented to some users upon login:

It says there isn't a drastic change in the look, but for users that are used to the older look and features, this is quite some change. It looks more like Gmail than the original hotmail:

It appears to be much faster and lighter than the older Windows Live Hotmail (since they got rid of most of the images and cleaned up their JavaScript). Overall, I am happy with the faster response time and the light-weight feel, but it will take some getting used to. Their promise of potentially unlimited storage and instant messaging from the inbox are very appealing. Google's Gmail has a lot of these features already but its bland and almost amateurish look is not for me.

I would hope they keep adding the promised features and add some more customizing options (including non-girly skins). What do you think?

Collection of Useful online tools

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:17:00 +0000

Following is a collection of some really useful tools available online. Will keep adding more services to this list. Any suggestions?

DabbleBoard	-	Dabbleboard is a powerful online whiteboard. It has a revolutionary new interface that gets out of your way and just lets you draw.
Print What You Like	-	PrintWhatYouLike is a free web page editor that gives you control of how web pages look when printed.
Lingro	-	Makes all the words on an entered website clickable.
Bust a Name/DomainFriend	-	Bust a Name/DomainFriend is a tool to help you find domains and manage them
PackageTrackr	-	One stop package tracker (Supported Carriers: UPS, USPS, FedEx, FedEx SmartPost, DHL/AirBorne, DHL Global Mail, TNT, UK City Link, Aramex, CEVA and UPS Mail Innovations).

Flaws of using Source lines of code (SLOC) as a software metric

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Wikipedia definition: "Source lines of code (SLOC) is a software metric used to measure the size of a software program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program's source code. SLOC is typically used to predict the amount of effort that will be required to develop a program, as well as to estimate programming productivity or effort once the software is produced."

In a recent company that I worked for, SLOC was used as the primary source for measuring programmer productivity in post project analyses since it is an easily computable metric. Though this might seem to be a fair and simple way to assess and compare productivity, it is fundamentally flawed.

For instance, comparing two or more different types of projects using SLOC would be irresponsible. A multi-threaded windows service written using C# cannot and should not be compared to a web site written using Java or VB.NET. For the windows service you may have intensive code dealing with thread management and concurrency issues, intensive IO operations, hierarchy of custom types, etc which takes a good amount of effort to design and develop and on the other hand you have a web site that may have more lines of markup and code-behind code overall but takes little effort to develop (powerful IDEs such as Visual Studio make development more like a drag and drop process with some additional effort).

In my opinion SLOC would only be useful as a metric in line-oriented languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL, Assembly, etc. It is an inappropriate metric for modern languages and environments and project managers need to stop using it as a defining metric.

Some clear disadvantages of SLOC as pointed out on wikipedia are:

Lack of Cohesion with Functionality: Skilled developers may be able to develop the same functionality with far less code, so one program with less LOC may exhibit more functionality than another similar program. In particular, LOC is a poor productivity measure of individuals, since a developer can develop only a few lines and still be more productive than a developer creating more lines of code.
Adverse Impact on Estimation: Estimates based on lines of code can adversely go wrong, in all possibility.
Developer’s Experience: Implementation of a specific logic differs based on the level of experience of the developer. Hence, number of lines of code differs from person to person. An experienced developer may implement certain functionality in fewer lines of code than another developer of relatively less experience does, though they use the same language.
Advent of GUI Tools: With the advent of GUI-based programming languages and tools such as Visual Basic, programmers can write relatively little code and achieve high levels of functionality. For example, instead of writing a program to create a window and draw a button, a user with a GUI tool can use drag-and-drop and other mouse operations to place components on a workspace. Code that is automatically generated by a GUI tool is not usually taken into consideration when using LOC methods of measurement. This results in variation between languages; the same task that can be done in a single line of code (or no code at all) in one language may require several lines of code in another.
Problems with Multiple Languages: In today’s software scenario, software is often developed in more than one language. Very often, a number of languages are employed depending on the complexity and requirements. Tracking and reporting of productivity and defect rates poses a serious problem in this case since defects cannot be attributed to a particular language subsequent to integration of the system. Function Point stands out to be the best measure of size in this case.
Lack of Counting Standards: There is no standard definition of what a line of code is. Do comments count? Are data declarations included? What happens if a statement extends over several lines? – These are the questions that often arise. Though organizations like SEI and IEEE have published some guidelines in an attempt to standardize counting, it is difficult to put these into practice especially in the face of newer and newer languages being introduced every year.
Psychology: A programmer whose productivity is being measured in lines of code, will be rewarded for generating more lines of code even though he could write the same functionality with fewer lines. The more management is focusing on lines of code, the more incentive the programmer has to expand his code with unneeded complexity. Since lines of code is proportional to the following cost of fixing bugs and maintaining the program in general, this is bad. It’s an example of the business proverb: "What you measure is what you get."

NewsGator service down

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:07:00 +0000

I use NewsGator's FeedDemon as my desktop feed reader. It is a great tool and has worked flawlessly for me up until today. Looks like NewsGator's service was down for a while as their site suggested with a misleading message:

The desktop client gives an even more misleading message saying that I cannot be authenticated:

I get that some of their servers may have been down (including their authentication server), but they could do with providing a more appropriate message.

Web site design tools

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:58:00 +0000

These are links to some free online tools you may find useful in making your web site:

http://www.colorcombos.com : Helps you find the perfect color combinations.

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/gradient: Gradient image maker.

http://www.stripegenerator.com: Lets you generate stripes.

http://www.spiffycorners.com: Lets you generate the CSS and HTML you need to create anti-aliased corners without using images or JavaScript.

http://www.reflectionmaker.com: Lets you generate reflections for your images.

http://famfamfam.com: A useful collection of icons.

Whole Travel - Beta woes

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Whole Travels, a travel site focused on green travel, launched in beta mode as reported by Rafe Needleman on Webware.

The site is neat and brings up some good results. They need to fix some issues though. Searching for "island" gave me information on what they are using on the back end and reveals information that could be used by a capable malicious user:

This is in beta so it is kind of expected. But I am amazed by the number of services launching without proper testing. Especially, since Google has pretty much changed the definition of beta by still having many of their finished products in beta. What do you think?

IE 8 Beta 2 woes

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:35:00 +0000

Beta software by definition means it is not entirely tested and there could be loopholes. But when a big product like Internet Explorer comes out in beta from a big corporation like Microsoft, you would expect it to already have some sort of stability. I normally like Microsoft products, inspite of all the hatred there is for them, since they make me more productive and make my life easier. This IE 8 Beta 2 is another story though. I like all the new features (color associated tabs, intellisense in the address bar, etc) but a browser needs to adhere to basic principles too - stability, fast performance and rendering all sorts of sites in a decent manner. This is definitely not the case with beta 2. It constantly freezes and doesn't even allow me to kill the process and it slaughters some of the sites I visit.

I am not a big fan of Google and to me they are the evil corporation, but their Chrome browser is stable, fast and renders most sites correctly (Windows Live Mail considers it an old/legacy browser though!). I hope this is really just beta holes that are closed soon and the finished product is what you would expect the number one browser to be.

Meetings and corporate environments

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:59:00 +0000

There is no dearth of meetings in a corporate environment. Calendars are filled up with status meetings, client meetings, online meetings and the list goes on. Most of these meetings, though, add little value to the organization and instead become avenues for witty remarks and buzzwords. Take status meetings for instance - they tend to be hugely redundant, the same questions and concerns are offered. This is not to say that meetings are not needed, indeed they are, but they need to be more focused and directed at the right audience. More than often everyone in a team is cramped into every meeting which is, in my opinion, a completely wasteful use of resources. Yes, that does give the entire team the opportunity to gel but there are other ways to facilitate team bonding.

Another sticking point is that more often than not, there isn't a set agenda for a meeting. Even if it is a short status meeting for instance, there needs to be an agenda. Otherwise humans tend to converse themselves into irrelevant directions.
Some reasons for arranging a meeting may include:

Get some questions answered
Get status updates on an ongoing project
Resolve blocking issues

...etc

All these and many other issues can either be partially or fully solved using available tools or at the very least they could lead to a more focused meeting. Some solutions to reduce the calendar clutter and to set the stage for a more agenda oriented and pointed discussion/meeting could be:

Corporate wikis
Corporate IMs (Eg: Microsoft Communicator)

I would hope more managers and higher ups realize the true value these sort of tools may bring to their teams and their organizations.

Technorati Tags: Corporate culture,IM,Managers,Meetings,Wikis

Redesign Gmail using stylesheets

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:30:00 +0000

Stylish - A Firefox add-on provided by Jason Barnabe allows you to easily load your own stylesheets in Firefox and can be applied to specific websites. It gives you the ability to either change some styles or completely change the entire look of a website.

A complete redesign for Gmail is offered by Globex Designs. The screenshot below shows what it may look like:

Technorati Tags: Firefox,Gmail,Google,Themes,Web

EverNote - Cool tool to store all your notes online

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:29:00 +0000

I recently came across a really cool new online service - EverNote that lets you store your clippings and capture your notes/memories. Sort of a OneNote on the go. You can access it on your computer and on any smart phone. The coolest part with this application is that it can identify text within images and you can tag all your entries. So searching becomes way easier.

In their words:

"EverNote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere."

It comes both as a desktop application and a web based application. It is pretty easy to install and use. They are in closed beta right now, but you can get an invitation on their site. Check it out here.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0,Web Tools

Google's hypocrisy!

noreply@blogger.com (Deepak Sharma) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:23:00 +0000

Hypocrisy! That word would be an understatement if you would research the beginnings of Google. The research paper that began it all can be found here: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"
I read their paper and was really surprised. Their intention was to build a web search engine that produced better search results and was NOT biased by advertising. The first part they got right but to say that their search results now are not biased by advertisements would be a flat out lie.

From their paper -- "Aside from tremendous growth, the Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997. At the same time, search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."
Look what they have become now. They are indeed a secret search enterprise and their entire establishment runs on advertising revenue.
Another example of their hypocrisy -- "For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
It was all the researchers in universities all across this country that made Google famous to begin with and to know that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page basically conned their adviser to get here is pretty surprising.

Technorati Tags: Google,Research,Web