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A lot is written about Project Management. If you search any good library or internet you can find articles describing project management and all the best practices. However on the ground I doubt if majority of the principles are put to practice. If they are, I doubt the consistency for the same.

Project Management to me is effectively managing Quality, Cost and Timelines of the project with confidence in your resources.

Some of the key aspects to Project Management are:

·         Communication

·         Nothing is as important as effective communication in Project Management. Effective communication involves expressing exactly what is required, nothing less nothing more. It also involves listening abilities and non-verbal communication.

·         Anyone who can master the art of effective communication already won half the battle in being a successful project manager.

·         Communication involves communicating with the Client, team members, peers and associates and all the other related parties.

·         Process Simplification

·         Processes are a key ingredient of a successful project. However over-do of processes are the key to many project failures. There is therefore a need to identify processes which works best for the given project and more importantly making sure that consistency is then maintained in adhering to the tailor made process.

·         Traceability

·         Tracking the progress of the project as frequently as possible helps avoiding any surprises. One simple yet effective technique that works is to have weekly status meeting with focused agenda. The meeting should just concentrate on the action items, pending items, risks and issues. Once identified the risks and issues should be communicated to the stake holders. This helps all the stake holders up-to date with the current situation and avoids any surprises at the later stages.

·         Incubating Innovation

·         One of the important function of a project manager is to promote innovation. This is not directly related to the delivery of the project. However there are lot of innovative minds at work during the project. And many a times some of these innovations change the entire way of project execution.

·         Team Identity

Project Management is lot about collaboration. If every team member realizes the objectives and responsibilities within the project, project execution becomes a lot easier.  Every individual should be made aware of his/her objectives and responsibilities within the project. No part of project is less important. Whether it is code development or configuration management or quality assurance. If the entire team understands the importance for the same, a lot of usual project management issues get resolved

I was looking into the details of rss today. Until now I know that RSS is used for sharing your blogs and a lot of other things. However not all was aligned and I was not getting an end to end idea of what exactly this is and how it works. So here it is from what I learnt today.
RSS is a xml reprensentation of your data in a typical format. There is no specified standard that RSS follows however RSS 1.0 version used W3C RCD standard.

So lets say you have a plain web page or any kind of document. If you manually convert that document or web page into an XML document with specified syntax, you have the RSS ready. Also there are RSSCreators which are available in the market which will help you generate RSS out of your non-rss content. If you dont want any RSSCreator it is also possible to create our own RSS manually as well. RSS Validators are also available which will validate the generated RSS feed.

Once you have a rss feed, anybody can take this feed and see the contents. Oh what a big deal. They can very well see the contents of my web page as well. Rite :-). However the good part of RSS is that, somebody who is interested in your content, can subscribe to your rss feed. We shall discuss methods of subscription later in this article.
Once somebody subscribes the rss feed, whenever you update the content for this feed, the subscriber will see the updated content automatically and they need not re-visit your site every one hour to check whether there is any update. So this is more of a push technology in that respect where the data will come to you instead of you going to data.

The automatic update of RSS feeds is thanks to RSS aggregators. RSS aggregators are programs which will watch out for the feeds that you subscribed and send you the updated content for those feed.

Coming back to subscriptions, so if you see any RSS content, it will have this icon <icon here> which says, subscribe to this feed. If you click on that it will ask you to choose on your favourite RSS readers where it can subscribe you. Also there is an e-mail subscription option which will send an e-mail everytime any content is updated on that rss feed.

RSS Discovery is finding out feed from the content. Let’s say your web page has n RSS feeds. Using RSS Discovery, you can get the exact xml corresponding to rss which you could subscribe to. Most of the online aggregators these days have the RSS discovery mechanism in built so that if you provide them the URL, it will fetch the appropriate RSS and you can select the RSS to subscribe.
I found an interesting article about RSS Discovery concepts here.

While browsing through RSS contents, I also came across a term OPML again related to RSS. OPML stands for Outline processor markup language ( I dont know where this markup language business is to extend :-)). OPML file lists all the RSS feeds into one. This helps in importing/exporting rss feeds acrosss aggregators. Also it is used by aggregators themselves to exchange feeds. Online OPML managers are also available to manage your OPML files.

7-7-7 for me was a day at Bar camp. The camp was hosted at Persistent systems. Being a part of the organizers, I planned to reach there at around 9. Although early showers in the morning delayed my plans and was there at around 9:30. Things had already started moving. The registrations had begun and the campers (participants) were enjoying early morning “Poha” with “chai”. It was good to see people praising your campus and canteen and everything.

The sessions started at 10:30. It was good to see that all the 3 tracks were almost packed before 10. I went and attended throughtworks presentation on “Fractuals and Complexity”. I really wondered before the session what is this guy suppose to talk about since I did not have any head or tail of the topic. But that was one thing that attracted me to attend the session and I enjoyed it. The theme behind the session that everything that nature designs is not complexity but rather simplicity. The trick is to figure out the applied algorithm which could may be iterative or repetive and they could really create complex structures. It was good to see people and companies exploring such mathematical and different ideas.

I also heard that TVGuide.in session which was running in parallel to this track was also an innovative concept and the teams had fun interacting with the speaker.

The next presentation by Adaitya Thatte about microsoft’s silverlight product was also informative. Meanwhile I also had discussions regarding the new co-operative IT concept with Ajay. This was again and interesting thing, which co-incidentently I was also thinking about sometimes before.

It was lunch time by then and we had a delicious lunch in Vinod and Priyanka’s company.

There was yet again an interesting session regarding “How to open start-ups in US, UK and India” by Rohas from Techturis. Rohas talked about some really interesting tricks and points which only a lawyer can think and analyze.

We had freeman talking about “Open source education” after that. Freeman discussed about the open source communities initiatives in reaching to masses with quality training through. I found this concept also catchy and would definitely like to contribute to the same. I also had a talk with Puja from marketwala.com meanwhile where she talked about how marketwala operates and interesting revenue models.

Anand from persistent also presented his idea of BLogger which was really an application in itself. Seems like he is triggering the semantic web concept and taking it to production :-).

Had a good time with the organizers too. All of them Kiran, Jatinder, Atul, Rohit11 (yes this is what his name is and we had a good debate on this :-)) all of us had interesting discussions and information sharing.

I would say, Barcamppune3 was a hit…..Enjoyed the day.

Hey All,

The bar camp fever continues. Let us get wet with bubbling new technology discussions along with drizzling rains at persistent, pune.

The topics seems to be interesting and I am sure all of us will have fun as always.

See you there.

I got a new external drive for my laptop this weekend. I just connected the drive to the laptop using the USB port and windows XP recognized the seagate external hard drive. This was good to observe. However after that I was not able to view any new drive created. I wonder how would I transfer my data onto the disk now. I spent sometime over it and managed to do that. I thought it would be useful for other folks to avoid spending that extra time. So I thought of listing down the steps required. Here you go..

Once you see that the drive is identified by the OS, and you can see icon in your system tray which says external device selected,

• GO to My Computer
• Right click on My Computer
• Go to Manage Tab
• Go to disk management
• You can now see the added external disk partition available witout anything.
• Just right click inside that partition space and say “mount”.
• This will change the status for the external disk to “basic” and “online”.
• Then once you have mounted the drive, again right click and say format.
• Once you format the drive it will ask you for the drive letter and once the formatting is done your drive would be visible for use.

Enjoy more space

Had my experience of the first blog/bar camp on saturday. It was really an unconference. However it would have been real cool without those product promos. Rest all was lovely, unique and fun.

My day started there at around 8:45 (one of the few early birds) when the things where just about to start at the venue…..I met sanket, a self-boss. Mechaninal engineer by profession and loved IT guys.. cool…good to know ppl still love them :-).

Met tarun and then headed towards the audi, where rajesh was present to greet us..the zimbra guy,was good to talk to. I offered by helping hand and he asked me to serve the gates :-)… which was fun too… rajesh,sanket,ranjan and myself were standing at the gate and ritika joined us.. She had volunteered for the event. we started with the registration process and distributing the cool blogcamp t-shirts and notepads to the participants.. ranjan was enthu at the beginning to click each one of the them but looking at the crowd later, gave up

The event was getting delayed but I had fun meeting and talking to ppl… there were these gupshup guys who were in true sense the gupshup dudes :-)… Thakkar and the gang were interesting to talk to and we had some nice talks. crowd started pouring in and it was fun to watch different sizes (since we were also distributing t-shirts :-))… Among the unique ones where melody, sakshi and divya uttam who made that presence felt instantly….after about an hour, I started talking with ppl in the audi and met eklavya the watconsult guy… he was also interesting and I had already made up my mind to talk to one/all of these guys. He gave me some interesting information and details.

The fun continued with a round of introductions. Everyone was unique and interesting is what I could observe. Some of them blogged for criket, some for their spouses and some for rakhi sawant and salman khan :-)… some were veteran bloggers with 4-5 yrs of blogging and some of them decided to get birth on that day

Some of them very in their mid-40es while there were a few who were in their teens (15 years to be precise)….All in all you could find almost everyone there

The sessions started with sulekha.com and purplenova presentation. The teams started talking abt their stuff. Although it was good, I would have prefered more experiences and intersting things in all arenas of blogging. I also learnt about OpenId, trackbacks and other stuff talking to people which was an added advantage. Met a big gang from persistent (in fact we realized we were in a majority there). I was also not aware of the fact that persistent is planning to have a bar camp on 7th July in the campus … :-(….

Kiran, jatinder and all informed me about the same. We had some exciting discussions about ruby on rails, and previous bar camps over lunch. The pool side lunch was also wonderful. Session after that was smsgupshup’s thakkar talking abt the product. even though this was again marketing it was done in an interesting manner and hence fun. I had work following me after that and had to run out of the fun…… so that’s Harshal reporting (apart from all those CNN-IBN and DNA reporters….) for his own channel

… Njoi

Hi All,

Look at this amazing new computing technique “Surface Computing” by Microsoft.

http://www.surface.com

Some of the useful utility software’s that really helped me when needed are :

1. Free Undelete

• Web:-http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/
• Description:-In case of accidental deletion of files on a NTFS (used by default in Windows XP, 2000 and NT), FAT32 or FAT16 file systems FreeUndelete is the utility to help.

2. Easy Cleaner

• Web:-http://www.toniarts.com
• Description:-Easy to use registry cleaner. It was a freeware when I downloaded. However now you might have to pay the initial fees for accessing products on the site.

3. cygwin
Web:-www.cygwin.com
Description:-If you need to use unix commands over windows, a really nice utility.

Rest still to come….

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2004/10/22/obfuscation.html

http://www.javaworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x_java.cgi