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Easy tasks are the hardest to finish

When you are assigned to a task which you know is easy… it is more likely that you won’t finish it on time than when you are assigned with considerably hard one.
Ok – it may not be applicable for those who are so enthusiastic towards work but for some one like me who requires a challenge to be working it’s true. :D I fall asleep while working other wise ;)

Buddhism corrupted…

My parents organized an all-night pirith chanting and alms-giving last weekend. And we were all distressed to find out the state of Buddhism in our home town. Only 2~3 Bhikku’s (Buddhist monk) could pronounce the Paali words correctly and some didn’t bother even to try. Following morning we found some cigarette buds in monk’s resting room. They hadn’t even bothered to hide it. (Buddhist monks (even lay men) are to retain from using alcohol, tobacco, drugs etc.)
But during the alms giving, they didn’t hesitate to order us to provide them with food of their wish. It wasn’t an alms giving at all but a feast. (Lord Buddha once has said; eat as if you were eating your own child’s meat - died while traveling through a desert- , in order for you to survive through the rest of the desert – just enough to keep yourself alive)…

Another nice buddhism link

Came accross a nice Buddhism site which contains an extensive collection of text

Recovery

After a frustrating week I’m cooling off. I’m still not @ my 100% performance but doing better than last week :).
I sleep 10~12h per day these days and it doesn’t feel like enough. And I wonder, why does cats make so much noise… can’t they do it quietly?

Bad day

If I'm to work at my 100%, my mind should be free of worries such as career progression, salary, team’s commitment towards the project etc. These are beyond my control but greatly affect my performance. If not for my great fascination for coding I would have already given up IT.

Wondeful buddhism site

I was searching the web for the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta to extract a part of it and came accross this nice online booklet which explains it well

Frustration

Coding frustrates when
1.) When you have to correct other’s errors
2.) When your IDE crashes or tools fails
3.) When you can not set your mind on code

Bored....and angry :X

I wish it rains
But then it should ease all my pains
Once in a while I wish I can cry
Without any one ever caring why
Why should I be able to smile
When deep inside I all I have is rile

VS 2005 is cooooool

I caught a flue and couldn't go to work for 3 days. While at home (well it’s not my home; me and my sister are renting an annex) I had the luxury of writing some code in VC# 2005 express and .Net framework 2.0. It’s awesome (let me enjoy a moment thinking about it….). Every one is talking about “generics”, yes it’s one of the wonderful features but partial classes… and … and if any one’s interested just download express editions and try it out. You’ll love it. May be this time next year we’d see framework 1.1 as we see vb6 or c++ now :)

Nice .Net Wiki

I was looking for a good wiki implementation and found this wonderful open source (BSD License) Wiki named SushiWiki.
It's so simple and powerful.
Thought of sharing it with others :D

Buddhism; shortest description

Not to do any evil, To cultivate good, To purify one's mind--This is the advice of the Buddhas.
- Dhamma padha

isn't it wonderful? with all the rush, fast cars, tight deadlines, tension... all we seek is peace in mind... and it's right there right inside of us waiting to be found. The world is so materialized that many wouldn't beleive it's true.

http://www.mahamevna.org/

My first published article

I wrote an article on a design I did as a part of my ongoing project during last weekend. And published it on codeproject.

It’s on functionality extension and change in applications after deploying.

Check it out :-D

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/userexit.asp

Importance of comunication skills

No matter how good you know some thing, if you can't convert what you know to right words... it as bad as you don't know - may be even worse
Lot depends on how you phrase it and how the listener make you phrase it. But at the end it counts :(

Copy rights and intellectual property rights

There was a nice mail fight going on at my office about copy rights and intellectual property rights violation. A teacher of mine was saying that by copying entire web articles in to mails and publishing them on private special interest group mailing lists, we could be violation laws. And some friends of mine were saying we are not. I found an article about fair use of others' work which says some could be justified and some not.
The mails were really interesting and educating, but unfortunately can not be published in the blog as I’m afraid I might be violating laws!!!

Porting best practice

What’s the best practice in porting an unknown (code written by an unknown party) project in to a new language?
What’s the order of components in which we should study and port the project from UI, Business Logic, and other supporting components like data access and logging?
My gut feeling is that we should study UI, then BL and supporting components last. And when porting, we should start from supporting components and move to UI through business logic.
In that way we know how exactly our code would be used and what could we expect…
Comments please…

Use of properties within the class scope

By the theories of OO we should use the private member within the class but not the Property.

But properties can be used to validate a value before being assigned to the private variable.

My personal idea is, when validation is required, have a separate private method to do validation and call that method inside the property’s setter and else where.

i.e:

Private m_name As String


Public Property Name() As String
Get
Return m_name
End Get
Set(ByVal Value As String)
Dim validValue As Boolean
validValue = ValidateName(Value)
If validValue Then
m_name = Value
End If
End Set
End Property

Private Function ValidateName(ByVal p_name As String) As Boolean
If p_name.Length < validvalue =" ValidateName(p_name)" m_name =" p_name">
Or should we set the property in side SetName method?
What is the best practice to use in such situations?

Please send in your ideas

Peer review

I had never done peer code reviews before. I did few today.
And was amazed to find out how effective it is!
I think it’s because we are better in seeing other peoples’ mistakes than our own.

Why I do it? - blogging

I'm not the guy who talk my way out...
I prefer to write it out :-)
So i thought - yeah i'll give it a shot... I'll create my own web site and have a blog in it.
I created a templete, wrote few articles... but couldn't really finish it.
So I started it here.