My Thoughts !

The first time I heard about Google Web Toolkit, I was excited. I immediately downloaded it; wrote few samples and found that it was really a nice piece of software. But it lacked one thing - IDE integration. Although "GWT was intentionally designed to work well in any IDE", there was no direct support for GWT in any IDE. I thought how about writing an Eclipse plugin for that? I'm not an Eclipse plugin developer. I was a pure C++ guy who has jumped into several layers of J2EE and .NET and settled as a mainline developer in a top SOA product. Eclipse plugin development is something I've to learn. I decided to give a try.

Result? Googlipse. That is my first plugin. With over 25,000 downloads and counting, it generated a good amount of interest. So I get bugs (yeah, sometimes I write embarrassing code) and people extend it. It was a wonderful experience in learning Eclipse and gave me a better understanding about the Open Source from the contributing perspective. Googlipse has shifted my career and now my day job is also plugin development. Besides all this, I've to kill Googlipse. Why? Because of the name!

I was over enthusiastic that I coined the name by joining two names: Google+Eclipse. The logo is also the same way, Google colored text in an Eclipse background. I thought who cares about the name. I was wrong.

Google's legal department had "some trademark concerns about the name". I was pointed to Google Branding Guidelines. So I decided to change the name and logo. Hmmmm. That means its virtually creating a new product (at least to the users who don't worry about the code!) That is what I've done now. I've created a brand new product called "Cypal Studio for GWT". It is hosted @ Google Code. Its essentially the same code base (with the same Apache 2.0 license) but with little changes and few bug fixes.

So what happens to Googlipse now? Its dead. Means there will be no more bug fixes, no more features. The existing downloads & code base will remain there @ SourceForge. The home page will be soon pointing to new product's site (which is under development). Thus ends the story of my first Eclipse Plugin.

I'm already seeing ads for apartments & housing projects in Hosur targetted for the people working in Electronics City. Commuting between Bangalore and Electronics City is a painful task. So what do people do sitting inside the bus/car? They go creative. I've got an email forward today with some nice cartoons. Ensoy!






As a person who travels around 6 kms in a road without signals and reaches office in less than 15 minutes, what should I say? I'm feeling lucky :-)

The first Aha! is for an experience @ Big Bazaar. The victim is Kousik.

The next Aha! is for an online shopping experience. Victim: Yours truly Pranni. I usually purchase domain names thru Yahoo! Although its not the cheapest, I've never found any troubles and I'm comfortable. This time, Yahoo! is helpless because its not a .com domain rather a .in domain. I've to inky, pinky, ponky and selected Rediff.com. I went ahead, ordered the domain, paid thru my credit card and then, boom. The transaction failed. I've to repeat all the process and this time its a success. Not so surprisingly, my credit card was charged twice :-( In the order confirmation mail, there was a phone number, which is not a local/toll free one. Before explaining this to a call center rep over an STD call, I thought I'll try my luck with the email support. I sent a very short email with the domain name and both the order numbers. Surprisingly next day I got a reply saying that they will credit the amount. More surprisingly within a week they did it without any more questions or deductions in the amount. Aha! I love Rediff!!!

The last Aha! is for an experience with Airtel. Victim is again me. I recently called the call center to change my DSL plan. The guy at the other end said that he will initiate the request and someone will call me explaining the available plans. They did call me and I placed a request for a Rs 600/- plan added with Rs 99/- for OneIndia plan for voice. 2 days later, they called me and said they cannot activate the request because the rental for voice service of Rs 25/- is waived only if the monthly charges are 700 and above. WTF? Mine is 699 and because of that 1 Re difference, I've to pay 25 bucks more! I asked is there any other solution? I was told if I purchase any other services like Caller tunes, the monthly charges will be more than 700 and that 25 will be waived. Well, the problem with that is, the cheapest feature costs me Rs 30/-. So if I pay 30, 25 will be waived. Nice :-) I opted to pay the rental.

This below picture says it all :-)

iSight camera is a nice tool to play with. Don't worry, this time I'm not going to scare you with my photos ;-)

I took some snaps of my princess with iSight. Look at the expressions after seeing her face in the screen. Priceless. Isn't it?

From Priceless Exp...