Sudeep D'Souza

Of late I have seen a lot of third party providers of Reliance Wimax connections in Hyderabad posting their phone number on my blog entry Going WiMax . The wimax connection really did not work out for me for the following reasons It just took a lot of time to get a connection each time I wanted one. It would sit for ages in trying to acquire network address. The speed was decent but nothing like the 2 mbps link that Airtel currently gives me. It was not really reliable. It would get cut of for no reason what-so-ever. On the whole my experience has not been good at all with the wi-max connection and had it disconnected. I now use Airtel which is completely underground in my area and the service that they offer is quite exceptional. Speed is good and I have not experienced any downtime in the last 1 month that I have been using it.

Its been a while since I blogged having not got the time and the inspiration for something different to write about. Yesterday wanting to be part of the world record for the largest number of downloads in a single day I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and then I heard so much about ScribeFire and so I decided to download and install that add-in for Firefox. From what I have experienced so far with ScribeFire it is quite wonderful. The biggest advantage of it is that it sits directly in your firefox browser and so when ever you feel like blogging you just press F8 and it displays a nice rich text area to write your thoughts in and click on the publish button and you are done. You do not need to log into your blogger account or you don't need to open another application just to say something. Since it makes it easy to blog you just feel like blogging when ever you get a thought. It has a ton of other features that I have not yet explored. For all those that use Firefox go ahead ...

There is a lot being said about the fuel price hike, so here are my views on it. If you are a tax paying citizen of India (a very few in this country which at the moment is less than 10% of the population) you are better off with the fuel increase.  With the prices of crude going up around the world the cost of buying crude for the oil companies is going up. If the costs of the inputs go up the cost of the output too is bound to go up. With the government controlling the price of gasoline this increase in output is not being transferred to the consumer. This increase is being borne by the government that gets its money from the tax payers. Hence it is our tax money that is going into subsidizing the cost of gasoline in this country. So if you are a tax paying person you are paying for the subsidy on the fuel that the citizens who are not paying tax are using (almost 90%). So if you are paying your taxes then you are better off with the prices going up.  The government should stop all s...

We had a very interesting issue in a project where the client was reporting an error in a screen that had hundreds of input fields but the client was not able to give us reproducible steps for the error. All that the client said was that the error was coming when a certain subset of values were selected in the input fields and the subset did not remain the same each time. In this case without reproducible steps it was virtually impossible to solve the problem. After a bit of thought, what we decided to do was to use Snagit video screen capture and record the screens of a group of developers using the screen causing the error extensively. Once we had this video we played it back and identified the points where the error was occurring and we could then rewind and take a snapshot of the screen just before the error occurred and also write down the steps that led to the data that caused the error. With this information we were able to identify a pattern that was causing the error and solv...

We had by-elections in our constituency and having got my voter identity card only a month ago I decided to go and cast my vote. My wife did not get her voter identity card (not sure why) so we decided to check if the voters list was online and if we could find any information. So a quick google search led us to http://ceo.ap.gov.in/ . Having filled in all the fields marked with * we were easily able to find her name in the list. We then wrote down the Part No and the Serial No in list and went to the polling booth and we were able to get the voting slip with absolutely no issues. We then proceeded to the voting booth and cast our vote. Its very interesting to see how simple and wonderful the whole electronic voting system is and how efficiently and accurately it works. Technology can vary from being very complex and doing thousands of things to it being simple but being limited in its capability. The adoption of technology is possible if it meets a set of desired goals while allowing ...

I was working on some estimates for a project by first estimating the size of the project and then estimating the effort by looking at some historical data on similar sized applications done in the past. What we realised that in all our projects we were pretty much on track with the estimated efforts until we reached the validation testing phase. In this phase we realised that we were spending anywhere between the initial estimated effort and three times the initial estimated effort. I then tried to analyse why we had such a vast variation in the estimates for this phase and I found that the prime reason for this is because there are defects slipping through all the other phases into the testing phase and thus skewing the entire estimate. If there is no control on the other phases of the project then this phase is pretty much a mess and usually it is so late in the project that it is very hard to recover from the mistakes made in the other phases. So if you see the project team can nev...

I was browsing a website today and it was interesting to see a Microsoft Ad come on Google Ads. Amidst all the battles that are being fought, it does look like Microsoft does needs Google's extensive ad network to popularize their products.