Sudeep D'Souza

Just about a week ago a bridge under construction came down in Hyderabad. I was at that point of time about 200 yards away from where it happened - I was stuck in a traffic jam. Its sinister to think that if it was not for that traffic jam I would have been very very close to the accident spot. What happened was that the scaffolding of the bridge gave way and the beams that the scaffolding was holding up came crashing down on the motorists on the busy road. 13 such beams each weighing 40 tons came down. Its Gods blessing that it was a sunday and it was raining that 2 people lost their lives. Bad enough the accident happened but what was shocking is that the injured in the accident were able to get to a hospital barely a kilometer away from the accident spot only after 2 hours due to the traffic blocking the traffic. Why is that if a politician is coming on a road they can clear it in a matter of minutes but when it comes to clearing the roads for an ambulance does not evoke the same re...

Let me start off by defining productivity - It is the ratio of the quantity and quality of units produced to the labor per unit of time. As we all know productivity is the measure of units produced in unit of time. But as you see in the definition above there is also quality involved in the units that are produced. So we can never calculate productivity only using quantity without quality. When we think of productivity in software everyone goes for the easiest measure - number of lines of code written in unit time usually a man day. This is a very very dangerous metric to use for the following reasons A lot of code is written by code generators and by copy pasting existing code and modifying it to suit ones needs. So there can be a large amount of code written in a very short span of time. A good design may cause a lot of code reuse - thus reducing the amount of code that is written but in turn improving performance and maintainability. Does this mean that the productivity has come do...

We went for a picnic to Pragati Resorts in Hyderabad and these are some of the pictures that were taken there of the resort. This is the entrance of the resort and on the right is the reception. This is the walkway leading away from the reception. It has a lot of greenery and it is quite beautiful. Swimming pool. It is not deep but there are a lot of slides. Careful if you are big made as you tend to roll over and your head hits the base of the pool. A nice ground to play cricket. A must do if you are in a big enough group. The portico around the swimming pool. Just cool to hang around. There are pool side rooms on top of this area but I can't seem to find the pictures. Will upload them as soon as I find them. This is the outdoor restaurant. This place has 2 restaurants. One is indoor and the other outdoor. The indoor restaurant doubles up as a bar so is not very conducive to families having food there as it is smoke filled and noisy. The outdoor place tends to get very dark in th...

India's economy is booming. India is on a fast growth trajectory. We hear many such slogans these days describing the booming Indian economy. But the last few days have shown that even though we have the best of products available in India the service level commitments of these companies is absolutely atrocious. Let me give you a few examples Kenstar I had a kenstar washing machine and the spin on it stopped working so I called up the service center and was promptly given a complaint number. I did not have a technician come to my house for 48 hours and only after numerous telephone calls and a lot of frustration. He then told me that he had to take the washing machine to his workshop to repair it and it would be gone for a further week that's when I decided to buy a new washing machine since the machine was anyway getting spoilt every 8 months or so. LG So I went and bought a new washing machine. The machine was delivered promptly and efficiently. I then called up LG to set ...

I was starting a meeting the other day on webexone and to my shock and amazement as soon as I gave the name of the meeting and clicked on "Start Meeting Now", I looked at the URL and I found my password there for all to see. Being an administrator of the account anyone getting this password could have pretty much done anything with the account. This is quite a serious security flaw in webex and I hope they fix it soon.

We at Inforica had an interesting summer this year. Three students had to do a summer project and I had a project that needed to be done for a local church. As a first step a senior developer along with myself sat down and decided what the requirements, design and scope of the project should be. We then interviewed these students and realised that they did not know C# but they had an aptitude to compute. So we first gave them some assignments in C# which they quickly learnt and completed. We then trained them on the design of the application and gave them a sample page that made use of the design. We then asked them to code all the pages similar to the sample. We then told them to code pages that were a little different from the sample and in the end we asked them to code completely new stuff. What was interesting and a great learning experience was that how 3 students who did not know C# were able to develop a production application in 6 weeks. You can read their blog Summer at Infor...

I was sitting at home watching a movie when I got a call from one of my friends asking me if I had heard the news about the bomb blasts. I was shocked when I heard it since Lumbini park would have been the kind of place I might have visited on a saturday evening (had it not rained) to go for a boat ride or to just hang around. What I don't understand is, what do these terrorists have in mind? I believe every action has an intended goal or perceived benefit, but in this case I see none of it. When you bomb a religious site you are targeting a community, when you bomb a financial center you want to bring down the economy and so on. But when you bomb a park that most probably the terrorists themselves will visit with their family I am not sure what message they are trying to send and to whom. If the goal is to dissuade investors - then I don't think this bomb blast would have achieved that since they did not hit at where the investment is happening. It is sad what they have done...