DataWebTect

After the failure of the “Thirty days to a web application” (Yes I accept failure), I started thinking. Is there anything out there that could cut my development cycle to a bare minimum at the same time achieving the functionality I needed. Then I stumbled upon “Drupal” and “Joomla“, two of the most finest CMS’s out there. I evaluated both of them and went with “Drupal“.

Drupal is just great. Although it took a while to configure some of the options which required you to post an issue to the support forum and searching through a maze of documentation. Their support is good within few hours I got an answer and fixed the issue. For some reason the USPS test link was not working and when I switched to the production mode it worked. Then I had the issue of showing the images and after few days I figured it out. The site is for an e-commerce application and is different from conventional sites. I also had a chance to play with the paypal sandbox and it is just great to have such a sandbox and thanks to paypal.
I will be writing about it soon and post the links. My plan is to go live sometime next week.

Meetings could be good and bad. I am sure everybody would have had an experience with a bad meeting where two people are trying to solve their problem without the concern for ten people in the room. Meetings could be effective if they are organized in a proper manner and only the agenda items are discussed. Sometimes the people get carried away and could create problems.

For the project management purposes, we may need to have a weekly meeting just to see how the project is going and to resolve any lingering issues. I review the issue and risk logs along with the project status in the project meetings. Then typically publish dashboard reports to the upper management. It works fairly in most of the projects. As you know a project manager would be better judge to determine the frequency of the meetings. He can sit with the project team to get the completion information for the plan but really need everybody in a room for just thiry minutes to review the documents. What do you think?

Randy has a thoughtful information about the Meeting creatures.

I purchased this product(Paid around $130) at least a year ago and have to accept it is just great. The system works well until I went on a trip to India. I saw that it was not compatible with the 220v std in India and assumed(?) that all I need is a converter to convert the voltage to 110v and everything would be fine. It was fine for few days until the charge was there and then it failed. Therefore I promptly took a converter and plugged the toothbrush charger and nothing happened. I tried hard and replaced the converter and still it was not working.

Then I came back and tried to use the charger and it was not working. Then I called the Sonicare customer care and they asked me to verify the charger. He said that the charger was broken and asked me if I had taken it abroad(This suggests that they get such calls often) and I had to admit that I did. He said that the converter do not work and it was written in the manual(Tell me how many people read the manual apart from the initial understand not mention if it was available at all). I could not find it immediately then he directed me to the location where it was printed. Sure enough it was there. Then I had to shell out $40 for a replacement.  He also said that they have a different charger which would work in India/Europe and other countries(More money to shell out).
Here is a product which is expensive and does not have trip mechanism to protect the charger.  A decision made by someone while developing the product had costed the consumer about 30% of the original cost to replace. On the other hand I had the Braun shaver which had the capability to work on either places and it worked without any problem. Here is the difference between the mindset of a German product versus others.  This product the toothbrush comes with a travel holder and they thought it would be helpful when traveling but forgot about the voltage differences in the countries. There are no warnings on the product itself.