Learning is an Art

It’s 1 am in the morning and you are returning from a late night party and you see some one struggling to start his bike what will you do?? How many of us will stop or even bother to think what that person will do or what I can do for that person?? Whether you do something or not is all together a different thing even this thought coming to your mind means you are morally responsible, as always I am not here to preach someone his moral responsibility I just want to share what just happened with me and what I did.

I was returning to my place and I noticed someone struggling to start his bike, I slowed down and looked at the guy and he looked backed at me I can see the trouble in his eyes, he knew he was in mess, he gently asked me is there any petrol pump around I looked at him in amazement there are hardly any petrol pumps in Pune those will be open at 1 am in night, but still I suggested him did you went towards the chandani chowk one though I knew the answer, he replied yes I did and it was closed.

What I just did, was that enough to help that guy I didn’t felt like. I said to him let me give you some petrol from my bike, guy was surprised and taken away. I asked him try to locate a bottle which we can use for the transfer, after looking around for a while we were able to find out a empty bottle I exclaimed you are a lucky guy he nodded his head in affirmation yeah I am lucky. I asked where he wants to go and accordingly I gave him the petrol, he happily took the petrol poured in his bike and was ready to go, he looked at me and asked do I give you something for this I was surprised and amused at the same time I said no that was hardly anything and at back of mind I thought if you really want to give me something back, help someone who is caught in similar problem as you were a while back that would be the biggest way you can pay me back and he thanked me many times but I went into deep thoughts of how many of us would have done similar thing or the person whom I just help would he reciprocate that gesture to someone else? in midst of these thoughts I started my bike and left and didn’t looked back

WANdisco is offering some free online training sessions over the next few weeks, for any that are interested.

The topics will include:

Introduction to Subversion for Developers – 5th May

All About Subversion Hook Scripts – 19th May

Using Subversion Locking – 2nd June

All About Subversion Checkouts – 16th June

Using the Subversion Diff Command – 30th June

Branching and Merging in Subversion 1.6.9 – 14th July

Feel free to see the website for more information:
http://wandisco.com/webinar/subversion/training

To install latest version of postgresql we first we need to add pgdg repository to list of repositories open terminal and fire following commands, you need to be root.

Once repository is installed properly use yum to install postgresql as shown below

You can do above in a single line choice is yours.

Initialize the database

Start the database server

Voila your database server is setup and ready to use.

In to the wilderness of night, people are preparing to sleep to end their day, I am sitting along thinking about dreaming and doing, dream is not you see when you are sleeping I have dreamed many a times awake in my full consciousness and that’s when the dream becomes reality.

Few days back I was wondering what’s gonna happen to my life if some day I failed at crucial point of time in my life and quickly realized by thinking this I am giving inroad to failure to ruin my dream, what ever you aspire about think about it day in day out, live with it sleep with it and keep it in your heartbeats than nothing in this world can stop you from reaching your dream or goal, major problem which I have faced in this is our logical reasoning to evaluate everything on Profit & Losss statement (P&L) that’s where the problem start when we subdue our instincts for fear which is projected in P&L statement, what I am today should not be mirror of that P&L statement but it should reflect what I really wanted to do in my life.

As in some speech Steve Jobs said imagine every day as it’s your last day of your life and ask your self are you doing what you are doing today will you be doing that if it would have been last day of your lives, don’t get carried away by dogma which surrounds you think what you want to do and do it.

I know I am no saint to preach all these things to all the intelligent people out there but still that’s what I believe in foolishly, to take it or not is up to reader and yes the disclaimer please don;t come to me saying I tried it all what you said and it did not work for me. It will not as you are unique incarnation of god what I can do you can not and what you can do I can not, that’s how the universe is created. Can you imagine everyone falling in love with only one beautiful girl on this planet, that simply does not happens for the reason we all know but than we ignore this in our lives we go after the same MBA degree, same MS from US of A , do we ever give it thought what we wanted from our lives, I know you will jump out of your couch and say I always wanted to do MBA I am sorry my friend I beg to differ that’s not what you wanted to do, that’s what you were forced to do by circumstances, I know there are 10% of people who actually take such decisions giving clear consideration to a lot of things and I respect their decisions but I am ruthless about other 90% of folks I simply pity them.

Seems like carlsberg effect is ending so is my enthusiasm to continue it further.

PS: No intention to hurt anyone opinions above are my own one, apologies to souls who are hurt by this post if any. Cheers

A great message from Steve jobs to all Entrepreneurs

Some nice phrases from the speech

you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. don’t lose faith.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

After looking around for a while for a review of JIRA 4.0 , I didn’t found much of stuff needed seems like people are not talking about it but than I thought lets give JIRA 4.0 much needed review and probably I would be able to help someone and vent out some of my liking and frustrations as one of customware employee and JIRA fan replied to me on twitter

I want to start on happy note so lets start with whats so cool about JIRA 4.0….obvious answer by any big fan will be JIRA gadgets, yes I would say nodding my head in affirmation, gadgets are pretty cool no doubt about them but Atlassian big fat claim that it can work in any social container and any other gadget will work in JIRA’s container is only partly true may be due to some container specific thing or what ever may be the reason for same.

2nd coolest thing is JQL it stands for JIRA Query language, please keep in mind I am calling these things cool and cool is not always the business case, so whats so special about JQL, it allows you to write SQL like queries from with JIRA, which actaully removed alot of or may be all JIRA’s limitation for filtering issues on criteria, now filters in JIRA are much more powerful than ever before thanks to JQL.

I can not control my self and I want to move on to what’s so bad, kindly note my point I am calling bad not uncool to affirm my point that cool is not the business case, first of all the current licensing model simply sucks what costed you $4k earlier now you even get that after paying $8k double appreciation in price in matter of one release, I don’t think any of the Atlassian customers would have ever imagined this catastroph it’s simply ridiculous.

Moving on other perils of JIRA 4.0 is the migration path from 3.13, Atlassian is a very open company they provide alot of documentation helping you in writing plugins and customization you want and than they screw you by breaking the API, I am not a big fan of M$ but one thing I always liked about them is they never break the contract with the developer old API’s always stay. What Atlassian did was just one release and few API’s were gone with the wind without even a single intimation of them being deprecated, I did analysis for efforts required to migrate from JIRA 3.13 to 4.0 for one of my customers and results were not so pleasing from him as they heavily customized JIRA and written around 27 odd plugins and to my surprise none of them worked out of the box in JIRA 4.0 what a crap, I suggested better not to migrate but than Atlassian will stop supporting 3.13 soon than they will be in much bigger soup.

One pending feature for ages better ldap support their strategy on this is pretty clear they want to sell crowd to you and will not add this feature in JIRA, every user comes and reads documentation that it’s planned some where in the road map and buys JIRA in hope he will see it soon but I didn’t got to see it in last 4 yrs , this issue has been recently estimated, I hope it gets completed in this decade, Atlassian has been very prudent in suggesting it’s customers to use crowd for ldap, I liked the business model but I hate it as customer and end user.

I can go on venting my anger on Atlassian but I don’t think they have any concerns about their licensing as alot of people are trapped and they can’t get out of it even they want to, my simple request to Atlassian and all other vendors if you expose API’s to developers than it’s your reponsibility to keep it intact, otherwise better not expose API’s.

PS: Alot of people might ask why I am reacting so late, fact is that this post was in my drafts for quite sometime now I was just not getting impetus to finish it today I had to write something but didn’t had a topic so completed this post

Here I am with my first youtube upload I have been trying a while to do some videos for demos but was not able to do it, so I went ahead first created a flash demo using wink and after googling around for a while I came across nice utility from iWisoft which is flash to video converter and conversion was pretty easy and straight forward. There is no audio added to it, I have used annotations for explaining things where ever required. This was my maiden effort may not be that good but still someone might find it useful, enjoy and have fun.

This video covers some basics of TortoiseSVN a client for Subversion.
Steps covered are checking out your code, adding some existing content, commiting changes to repository, reverting to older revision and how to view log and compare two revisions.

In this article I am going to put on links to various useful Subversion resource available on internet which can get you started with using Subversion easily; whether you are end user or a developer looking for an API for language of your choice and I hope you all can contribute to grow this list further I am aware that there is exhaustive list already available on tigris site.

Lets start this list

Subversion Home : Home of the great tool you can find the binaries for latest version from the website based on operating system of your choice it also includes collabnet certified binaries.

TortoiseSVN : Most preferred Subversion client for windows

VisualSVN : Great tool to get you started quickly with Subversion without any hassles comes with Apache and wizard based setup is just awesome for newbies

AnkhSVN : Visual studio integration for all M$ fans

RapidSVN : Multi-platform GUI front-end

SVNKIT : Java API for Subversion, pretty easy to get started lot’s examples available and documentation is just awesome

PySVN : Python API for Subversion, nice pythonic interface, some people might differ and point out Subvertpy is more pythonic, I like both of them equally.

This list is In progress and I will keep updating it.

I recently setup Subversion on Centos as well as RHEL, so thought will share the steps followed though it’s pretty straight forward it will help people looking for it and will be available to me for future references as well

Step1 Install rpmforge repository

Step2 Install Subversion

Step3 Install mod_dav_svn (Only required if you planning Apache Integration)

Voila and you are done, go to command prompt and type following

You should see output as below

I wanted to write this post from long time at least 2 years now, when I came across MLM for first time, I think the company was some ‘quest’ selling some gold coins, but I was refraining from writing but few days back I got a similar mail saying it’s some ecommerce business and details will be only disclosed when I meet them in person, I was able to sniff the MLM from it pretty easily.

Mail contents are as shown below

I have removed contact details and some irrelevant things from the mail.

So why I say MLM is fraud, I say it because the basic principle on which it is based is flawed, I am not going to cover all the detail of MLM there is umpteen material available on interent just Google for it, adding fraud word it leads to lots of results too, yeah getting back to why I say it’s a fraud being a programmer I have read the concept of binary trees so what so special about binary trees every programmers knows about it, special thing is that number of nodes which will have two nodes below them is half the total number of nodes, so drawing this parallel to MLM which seeks every person to have at least two person(Nodes) below them, wait a moment what I just said contradicts concept of binary trees so that’s practically not possible. So come what may half the people joining in MLM pyramid is bound to loose all their money. People who get money out of this are not getting it by doing something but fooling more people to join in and laying there hands on their hard earned money, so there’s no business here.

That was just one point but there is more to it, products which you have to sell is at much higher costs than their actual value, for e.g. some coin which you need to sell was around 30k 2 years back it was rare according to them as it was manufactured in less quantities and will have a very high value in future, is that the definition of rare if today I start manufacturing something and just create on piece out of it will it make it rare, I looked at ebay to get actual price of that coin, it was easily available and at much lower cost.

Though many a times it’s difficult to prove that this business is illegal but than there are things which are legally right but ethically wrong and things which are legally wrong but ethically correct.

I will end this here promising to revisit this post again sometime in future with some more details, but for me bottom line is MLM is fraud in most of the cases.

Some links related to MLM happy reading.

Wikipedia definition of MLM

RBI flashes red signal at MLM companies

MLM Watch