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...

Yesterday I was speaking with my friend whose is thinking of getting a new car. He asked me, if I were to buy a car, which car will I decide. Nice question. Me making a decision?

Well, when was the last time I made a decision by myself? I digged into my memories and finally found it out. It was a nice evening and I was in Chennai. I was sitting in the balcony and was thinking "Should I marry or not". I decided to get married. Thats it. After that I don't decide much. Initially it was something like this:

He : Wow, what a nice shirt? I'm going to buy that.
She: What? A black shirt. No that will not fit you da. Let us look for something else

Read the "Let us" as "I will". For the first few times it was little tough. After that I got used to that. Now its more or less like this:

(While driving)
He : Shall I take right and go thru Old Madras Road or turn left and go thru Airport Road
She: Thru Airport Road.

(Over a phone)
He : Hey She. What are you doing?
She: Cooking. Why?
He : illa, I've a small doubt. I need to name a variable. Which one sounds better? "isSynchronized" or "isInSync".
She: Try "isSynced"

See, making decisions is no more my job. Its been delegated to her. Now, my friends ask me about which Car will I decide. Poor bachelor. He doesn't have the comfort of having someone else do all the thinking and making decision. He has to do it by himself. I pity him.

PS:
In another two days, both chinna ammani and peria ammani are coming. Expect more He-She coming up ;-)

When I was wondering about this, I get to see this also. :-(

The Securities and Exchange Commission of US has done a brave move, which is to be welcomed by every e-mail user. Confused? Read this. It takes lot of guts to take this decision. These kind of decisions will definitely reduce spam mails. What next? Ban the sites that sell the software at "unimaginable cost"? Ban the pharmacies which sells the viagara and "increase my length"? Ban the banks which "approved loans"?

For me above all, I'm willing to donate my

• 3yr old PC loaded with Ubuntu


• my Adidas T Shirt that I bought with 50% flat discount


• my Project Manager

all to Google, if they can freeze the email ids of persons who forwarded me the great "Vijaya T. Rajender & Mumtaj in Veerasamy" photo.

Mayflowers trees (aka Fire of the Forest) are beautiful during the month of May. The tree will have very few leaves and will be full of those red flowers. Other months those are simply just an other tree.

February Flowers falls in the same category. There were lot of these trees in Bangalore and till Jan I didn't knew about them. In the past few weeks, they have become beautiful and got my attention. They are in different colors. Yellow, Blue, Pink, etc. Mayflowers at least have few leaves, but these trees are full of flowers. Raja has taken some snaps of these flowers.

Check this, this and this.

BTW, does anyone know the real name of these flowers? I didn't know the real name, so I call these February Flowers :-)

Related links:
May Flowers

Happened to see a nice video in youtube. Check it out: