DataWebTect

A very interesting post about the email etiquette and effective communication to increase productivity. It has a list of 99 tips among which here are my favorites:

5. Be professional. Ensure your work emails don’t contain ‘u’, ‘afk’, ‘ty’, ‘jk’ and/or several million other texting/chatroom acronyms. These developed because cell phones’ keypads aren’t well-suited to writing fully-formed words, sentences and paragraphs. In business communications, however, they may give the impression of childishness and illiteracy.

20. Cheat with templates. In his Five Fast Email Productivity Tips, author Merlin Mann recommends ‘cheating’ — using templates and form letters - when you find yourself answering (or asking) the same questions repeatedly. A good percentage of first-year college students learn to do this when writing email to family, friends, and significant friends back home.

22. Remember the telephone. Unless you need a written record of a given communication (or if the person you’re communicating with is long distance), consider calling (or sending a letter to) your intended recipient instead of an email. People often default to writing an email because it is quick and easy; but sometimes a handwritten letter or phone call can provide the personal touch your communication really needs.

33. Respond promptly. Don’t leave email unread for more than two days. Look at it immediately and either respond to it immediately, or — after reading it — move it to a “must respond” folder.

44. GTD - get things done. Don’t move anything from your main inbox into a folder if you haven’t read it yet. It’s likely to stay that way. Read it, respond, and file it. That way, your main inbox holds only unread messages. Or at worst, those you haven’t responded to yet. This makes it easier to “get things done” more efficiently, in terms of email-triggered tasks.

97. Don’t just delete — destroy. When it’s time to upgrade, back up, then import your email and other important files to the new computer. Then comes the important part. Stories of bountiful private data harvested from used and ‘recycled’ computer hard drives whose data had simply been deleted from the OS or the command line (or dealt with by DOS’s FDisk) are rife. Many of these originated with an exercise performed by Simson Garfinkle and Abhi Shelat, who published what they’d found on 150 used hard drives they’d purchased. If you don’t trust erasure programs which overwrite sectors many, many times, you might consider a metal chipper shredder (or, if on a budget, sledge-hammering the platters.

PS 3 came and gone. None of the retailers carry it and need to pay a fortune in eBay. Don’t worry if you are not able to get it? You have not missed much. Per the independent NY times report the author has contrasted between the Xbox and PS 3 and feels that xbox is better than ps3. Gigaom  and Michael has some comments.
Sony has disappointed the reputation it had in the gaming world. Not only that here is the bitter experience I had with their customer support.

Recently my Sony Vaio desktop pc crashed. I was trying to get help from Sony’s customer support. First I started with the online chat. The chat went on for an hour and they sent bunch of links which I executed faithfully to see if it fixes the problem. Unfortunately, the problem was not fixed. Then they suggested that I talk to their telephone customer support. Diligently, I called them and they I hear the machine and it says I need to provide the $29.95 for talking to their customer support human being, otherwise directs to the online chat. Here again I go to the chat and the previous rhetoric follows. I execute some commands as per their instruction and it does not resolve the problem. Then they suggest that I need to go the local service center and send me a link to locate the same. It provides the location and says that I need to pay $384/- for diagnostics.  I say why should I pay that much amount for which I could get a new computer. They say that that is the only way they can help. I ask them if Sony really cares about customers and there is no answer and rudely they disconnect the chat.

The above two instances shows the direction Sony is going and it is not North but South. In the first instance you do not have the “Kick ass product” and on the other end there is no customer support. There many other instances wherein sony has failed.

Loud Thinking

Message Forums

DRM Rootkit settlement yet to be settled

Talking Story

This is a great landmark in the Web 2.0 world. Enterprises take their own time to embrace the new technologies that come in the marketplace not only to see how it plays out but also due to exorbitant cost of transitioning the legacy applications to the new platform. Intel has gone beyond and create a suite of applications for the enterprise and may be the first one to do so. I could be wrong. But this is a big step. Jeff from Intelblog highlights the same.

An interesting post on the mundane issue of switching context of the programmers. I am sure everybody has been there in that situation. Here the author describes the situation wherein a programmer was dragged into fixing a bug for an old project while on an iteration of the new project. I can see eye to eye on how we feel if we are dragged in between the productive work to dig and identify the problem. More often than not this takes many days to resolve, meanwhile we cannot concentrate on the new project nor on the old one resulting in lost productivity.

Dmitri Zimine has taken the stand that the programmer should not be interrupted with here iteration and the project manager need to be convinced that he wait until the iteration was over. But Joel has taken the opposite stand eventhough acknowledging Dmitri’s stance.

The issue is paradoxical because on the one hand if you interrupt and change the context it would take more time but if you don’t fix the old bug it would take away a customer. Here I have to lean towards Joel as “customer is God”. How often have we seen the exodus of clients because of poor customer service and the same applies if the bug in the old software is not fixed the customer could go away and there would not be any takers for the new product. Joel gives a nice example of how they fixed the bug in copilot because of the IE 7 and convinces that Agile is about switching contexts fast and producing results. Again we do not know the real life situation which could have triggered the kind of response Dmitri has taken.

Are you one of those who will make office pranks. If you are send some pictures. But if you are not here is some thing to check out. The techrepublic has published some unique pictures including the one below.

The other day I attended a IEEE meeting on Cryptography 101 and 102, it was really an eye opener. The presenter dug deep into the history of cryptography and presented starting from the ENIGMA days how the cryptography evolved. I got this interest from Da Vinci Code where dan brown talks about the cryptography to some extent. The presentation also talked about the evolution of Diffie Hellman algorithm which is the foundation of the current ssl and PGP encryptions. By the way do you know what PGP means it means “Pretty Good Privacy”. Then he rattled on and on and there was a mention about the “Manhattan Project” and how it was compromised and how they identified the spies etc., all in all it was really good. For those of you interested in an authentic blog here is one from Schneier.

My entry is up in the Best of me Symphony.

More often than not many developers tend to overlook the SQL Injection bug pointed out by Joel. Here is the problem:

$x = pg_query("select * from accounts where name='" . $_GET["name"] . "'");

If the name contains words like ‘doesn’t’ the singe quote in the middle messes up the query. This can be mitigated by two ways.

1) Using Magic Quotes - which will escape the incoming strings but they were an annoyance and therefore they removed it from PHP 6.

2) Using mysql_real_escape_string as follows:

$name = “‘” . mysql_real_escape_string($_GET["name"] ) . “‘”;

Of course you need to validate that it is not numeric before you can pass the string to the mysql_real_escape_string.

You can find a good example in the PHP net .

Rands in Repose has a post about the textmate which is a text editor for Mac. I do  not have Mac but Rands describes the design of this particular text editor in very succinct manner. For the developers the text editor is one of the challenging piece of software and being one I constantly use Notepad(yes, notepad) and Textpad. The requirement for a good editor is essential, because you are going to use it for any number of reasons from storing a temporary code segment until you test your examples or for editing a new language for which you do not have an IDE downloaded. As such the understanding and the use of the text editor should be intuitive and as Rands says should allow the user to discover and use it at his convenience ,  rather  than  screaming about the feature as it happens in excel and project. I agree with Rands about the wizards and I never use them, because you never know what will be the outcome. I have not a seen a single wizard that could magically solve all my problems or create an application from scratch. It is, in my belief, an over ambitious effort to provide wizards thinking that the developers are dumb or trying to make the dumb feel helpless.