Help Required!

Last week, my Mamaji wanted to confirm his tickets back to Germany. The tickets have to be confirmed with the Airlines 72 hours before departure. He had booked his tickets with Turkish Airlines. To confirm the booking, we had to make a call to the Turkish Airlines. Now the question is - How do we get the number?

Thanks to 22222222 - the number of yellow pages. I called them up and asked for help to get the number of Turkish Airlines. The customer care executive took my mobile number and within 5 minutes I got the SMS with the number of Turkish Airlines office in Delhi.

Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.

Director: Reema Kagti

Theatre: Shakuntalam, Delhi

Date: 22nd March, 2007

Eklavya

Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Theatre: PVR Rivoli, CP

Date: 24th February, 2007

Got Married

And here is the wedding card :)

IGI Airport to Punjab

Are you coming from outside India and want to go to a place in Punjab?

http://www.indocanadiantransport.com/online_booking.php

You can book a BUS ticket to a place in Punjab through the above link.

SALAAM-E-ISHQ

Director: Nikhil Advani

Theatre: Waves, Noida

Date: 28th January, 2007

Dialogues:

Hamara kal chahe jaisa bhi ho, hum milkar usey sundar banaye

Pyaar waqt se nahin, usse kiya jaata hai jiske saath hum waqt guzarte hain

GURU

Director: Mani Ratnam

Theatre: Satyam, Janakpuri

Date: 13th January, 2007

Kabul Express

Director: Kabir Khan

Theatre: Shakuntalam

Date: 6th January, 2007

Koshish Karne Walon Ki

Career Objectives

A few years back a cousin of mine was planning to give a MBA entrance exam. He was asked to pen down the reasons why he would like to join the institute. I tried to help him to pen down the things. Below is the stuff we wrote in the entrance form:

I want to be part of the elite group of the organization which helps in shaping employees lives. I believe that FMS would help me in developing all the necessary skills required to make a rationale decision about issues that wuold have an overall imapct on the lives of the employees. Someone had right said 'Life is too short to learn everything through experiece, so try and learn through the experience of others'. I hope that FMS, through its esteemed faculty, would be able to mould my experiences so that I can help people who come in my vicinity to make the right decisions. Ten years from now, I see myself heading a group of people whose future might be dependent on the decisions made by the top management. I hope that FMS would provide me with a framework that would help me in deciding what is the BEST for all and make that essential difference between the good, the better and THE BEST.

Painless Software Schedules

Some excerpts from the Article on Joel On Software

So, you have to make a schedule. This is something almost no programmer wants to do. In my experience, the vast majority just try to get away with not making a schedule at all. Of the few that make a schedule, most are only doing it because their boss made them do it, halfheartedly, and nobody actually believes the schedule except for upper management, which simultaneously believes that "no software project is ever on time" and in the existence of UFOs.

So why doesn't anybody make a schedule? Two key reasons. One, it's a real pain. Two, nobody believes that it's worth anything. Why go to all the trouble working on a schedule if it's not going to be right? There is a perception that schedules are consistently wrong, and only get worse as time goes on, so why suffer for naught?

Programmers are not interchangeable. It takes seven times longer for John to fix Rita's bug than for Rita to fix Rita's bug.

When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take.

And when you haven't thought about what you're going to do, you just can't know how long it will take.

If you have to figure out what subroutines you're going to write, you are forced to pin down the feature. By being forced to plan ahead at this level, you eliminate a lot of the instability in a software project.

Most programmers have no idea how to guess how long things will take. That's okay. As long as you are continuously learning and continuously updating the schedule as you learn, the schedule will work.

Updating your schedule daily should only take about two minutes. That's why this is the Painless Schedule Method -- it's quick and easy.

A programmer should never, ever work on new code if they could instead be fixing bugs.

The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.

You might be able to get 20% more raw code out of people by begging everybody to work super hard, no matter how tired they get. Boom, debugging time doubles.

But you can never get 3n from n, ever, and if you think you can, please email me the stock ticker of your company so I can short it.

Not many of them are running business what-if scenarios... these are programmers, here

Ghar ke one liners

Jeetey raho, sukhi raho. Ishwar vidya de, bal de, budhi de, tandrusti de. Vidwan bano, maan-baap ka naam roshan karne wale bano.

Cha peesen, roti khaansen

Chottey.......

Guddo.......

Motto.......

Ved.......

Mammi, tun badi nikammi. Teri jaan nu bachen rovan, tun khele rammi.

DON

Director: Farhan Akhtar

Theatre: Waves, Noida

Date: 24th October, 2006

Dialogues:

Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai

Log Don ko nahin, duniya ko chod ke jaate hai

Don ke peeche 11 deshon ki police padi hui hai

Tumhen maloom hai ki is pistol mein goli nahin hai, mujhe maloom hai ki is pistol mein goli nahin hai, lekin police ko to nahin maloom ki is pistol mein goli nahin hai

Why is execution so important?

Almost anybody can tell you what is theoretically right. I know it, you know it and almost everyone in the world knows it. BUT, who ensures that what is theoretically right is executed right. In the professional world, every day we have lots of meetings and everyday we take lots of decisions. YES, all those are right, BUT who ensures that they are executed. Planning takes 30 minutes and its execution 30 hours :)

Below is an E-Mail which I had sent on 7th Feb, 2004 to one of my Ex-Managers. Two and a half years down the lane, we are still trying to execute it. Had I led it to a proper closure that day and at that time, the cost now would have been too low and we would already have reaped the benefits.

Hopefully I would learn something from it and be careful the next time :)

Hi

I have tried to work on a framework with the help of which the automation of the testing of wireless STAs can be done (with the help of WirelessConfigurationTool package). It will require add ons to the code we have for PrismServer and PrismProfileChanged and implementation of test cases. I am giving a brief overview of the idea I have in mind:

There will be test suites and test cases within suites. Test suites are a group of test cases for which the settings of the AP will remain the same. Each test case will have some configuration information in the form of XML going to the PrismPCtl running on the DUT (depending on the test case being executed). The Wireless STA settings will be changed accordingly and the expected result noted.

Before triggering a new test suite, the user will be prompted for permission. This is required because before executing each test suite, the settings of the AP need to be changed accordingly. The prompt would give the user time to change the settings of the AP. This also can be automated by synchronization between the changing of settings in the AP and the transmission of new profiles to the STA.

The framework I have tried to make has the concept of test suites and test cases built in. It prompts the user before starting the test cases within a test suite. The full automation (i.e. automatic setting of AP after each test suite) is not yet done, but theoretically speaking it should not be a tough task.

The ADVANTAGES of automating the test cases are:

a) I think that after a fair deal of automation, only one day should be required per DUT for testing purposes. Thus it should save *lots of time*.

b) There is no need to *repeat the monotonous activity* of running the test cases reading a test case document, after we have considerable faith in the automation of test cases and they start giving the desired results.

c) It should *save lots of firmware dependent bugs* because it is not feasible to run the whole bunch of test cases manually after each firmware / UMAC revision is released (which have been quite frequent going by past experiences).

d) It should be *quite easy to append* new test cases to the test suite as more and more features become available (WPA, WPA-PSK).

e) The test suites test the wireless features and thus they *should be independent* of the type of DUT we are working on. For ex. the same bunch of test cases should work with a USB Cohiba or a PCI device attached to the laptop.

Thanks
Vaibhav

Good things I have learnt from my past managers

Change the circumstances and the same people will behave differently.

It is not the people but the circumstances which create the problem.

Separate the people from the problem.

What would I do if I am a chef of a restaurant and I have customers who are waiting eagerly for a meal? I would put some onion and start frying it. The smell would tell the customers that something is cooking and their patience level would rise. This would give me time to prepare what they want.

I can show you the path, but I cannot walk for you.

Why do I reject lots of resumes?

Some time back, I have been assigned the responsiblity to scan resumes for Linux requirements in our BU. The Human Resource team sends me a list of resumes which they believe should suit the profile, I go through them and then give my feedback to them. In the feedback, I am supposed to suggest to them about the candidates with whom we should go in for a telephonic interview. A thing which I had not been noticing and was brought to my notice by an E-Mail was that I was rejecting a lot of resumes at the initial scanning stage itself. Now that makes the job of the HR more tough because it means they need to get even more resumes. I was asked the reason on why I reject so many of the resumes. That made me think about what we are focused on.

I am working for the Wireless BU of a semiconductor company which is responsible for delivering sample network drivers for different BUS interfaces in Linux kernel and also other Embedded Operating Systems.

The above line summarizes the logic on the basis of which I shortlist candidates for telephonic interviews:

1. Wireless
2. Network Drivers
   
3. BUS Interfaces
4. Linux Kernel
5. Embedded Experience
6. Operating Systems

If the resume matches 6 out of 6 criteria, then he / she is my first priority. If the resumes matches 5 out of 6, I still shortlist them. Anything lesser would not do.

I am very much inspired by the following excerpt while shortlisting people (and I would be even more choosy if I had to run my own company):

An important thing to remember about interviewing is this: it is much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people's time fixing all their bugs. If you have any doubts whatsoever, No Hire.

For more details about the article, refer to The Guerilla Guide To Interviewing

And I Quote :)

How many times have you heard this quote doing the office rounds?

"Please do not tell it to anybody"

The end result of the rumour mills working overtime is that

"Everyone knows everything but no one knows anything"

Someone resigns and no one knows it
Someone does not resign, still everyone believes he / she has
Someone is promoted and no one knows it
Someone gets a new job responsibility and no one knows it

Did the Google Guys listen to me?

In my post "This is not fair" I had raised a question on Googles ability to search my posts properly. I had started adding a Category to each of my posts to make the search of the posts easier, but unfortunately the keyword search wasn't working properly. In the post, I had requested Google team (hmmmm, do they read all these posts or is it just sheer co-incidence) to check why it wasn't working? Now, they have introduced the CATEGORY FEATURE in the Beta version of Blogger. THANKS GOOGLE :)

Lage Raho Munnabhai

Director: Rajkumar Hirani

Theatre: Liberty, New Delhi

Date: 2nd September, 2006

Khosla Ka Ghosla

Director: Dibakar Banerjee

Theatre: PVR Spice, Noida

Date: 7th October, 2006

Dialogue: Jaisi bimaari waisa ilaaj