Of This and That

Microsoft’s Windows 10, last of the lot , upgrade started to roll out yesterday world-wide and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be one of those who upgrade on the first day. While at my home laptop I had reserved the Windows 10 upgrade via the Windows icon in the task bar, I had not been able to do so for my work laptop. The Windows icon wasn’t appearing. KB 3035583 is required to be installed via Windows Update for the icon to appear, however my attempts to install this optional update failed continuously. When I tried various options like sfc /scannow or DSIM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth , I could not get past the failure. My system constantly showed that a system reboot was pending and however many times I rebooted, it kept showing the same message. I wasn’t however going to miss the opportunity for the free upgrade, so I followed the steps mentioned in this article . Note that if you are upgrading the OS on the machine on which you access this link, then...

Close to 20 years back when I joined the IT Industry, I felt that I could increase my productivity many fold if I could learning typing. I had seen people struggle to type on the keyboards even after years of use, and it basically was due to the fact that they had never tried to really learn typing. A classic case was one of my colleagues who used to hold the keyboard with one hand and used his pointing figure of other hand to type. In time he did get good speed with it, but it was still not fast enough.  With proper training, one can type almost at the speed with which one is thinking and that's when you get the true benefits. To put my plan into action I had downloaded a few free tools that taught typing and once I felt comfortable, I started getting my daily news paper to office. I would pick up any random article, open notepad and start typing it. My attempt was to type as much as I could without looking at the keyboard, but only at the news paper and then see how much mista...

The other day I was reading " India's IT Party is over. Reinvent yourself or suffer " by Ravi Venkatesan. He has touched upon some very interesting points. The point on slower rise in incomes, slow hiring etc. I feel should also be looked at from another angle. Any new industry will typically have an initial high rise, high demand period and slowly in time it will saturate. About 40 years back, when the IT industry as an Industry started to pick up, it was like an ocean and anyone getting into it like a drop in the ocean. So there was plenty of demand but very less supply. Hence things moved fast for the initial players. They got good business, good rates, they rose very fast and expanded at a fast page. In nascent stage as the organization was growing, it needed more and more people, so ‘hiring’ was good. It needed more and more people to manage the growing work, so ‘promotions’ were good. Business was growing by leaps and bounds, so the ‘compensation hikes’ were g...

I got a chance to attend a CIO Klub organized daylong conference called " CIO Tech 2015 - Leveraging Technology for Business Transformation " this last Friday. It was a good event with all topics of discussions very relevant to the very current issues that CIOs/CTOs face.  As I reached the venue, I immediately felt out of place as I seemed to be the only one not in a business suit. I had thought about wearing one, but the May heat discouraged me. My mistake that I missed the point that the venue would be well air conditioned.  The conference stared 10 min, but that's very reasonable given how such conferences are. By the time the initial key note was over, we were running 20 min behind schedule. But I must mention that during the course of the day, things got back on track and the last the session of the day finished right on target at 4.00 pm. I had to skip the final Mind Matters session as had some personal work to attend to.  In the keynote address Mr. Manoj Bar...

19th May 2014 was a milestone date in my career and I had written all about it here . Today, a year later, I think it is but expected that I look back and think about this year gone by.  I could not have imagined a life outside of Infosys for all the years I had been working there. A friend even had joked when he heard about my resignation, "How can you leave Infosys? I have been saving to come to your retirement party!". Afterwards, over the months I did think if I did miss Infosys and had shared my feelings here .  A year later now, it is time to do my personal annual appraisal and share the results. The catch is that this is a self appraisal and hence the results may be biased :). It has been an exciting 1 year outside the campus that's a dream come true for so many youngsters. While I am yet to complete 1 year at my new organization, Curologic , but I could not have asked for something better. Working in a start-up has its own challenges and you ...

Node.js has gained lot of traction in the last few years and many high performance sites are today using it. When we started with it, I wanted to understand what’s it that makes node.js so high performant, over and above the regular web servers, which were created with the purpose of being able to handle loads of incoming requests. The answer lies in the core of node.js that uses a single thread for its main execution and passes on the work to asynchronous functions. In the world of multitasking and multi-core CPU machines, this come as a surprise, but then when you look at the cost of creating all these parallel threads vs handling all incoming requests in a single thread, you suddenly realize the benefits, and is very clearly visible also in the performance it delivers. As I thought about this, I realized that this concept isn’t new but is something that is at the heart of windows programming, something I had learnt back in 1995. We had started programming on Windows for Wo...

"Change is the only constant" is something that we in IT world strongly believe in and the technological evolution around us have been a constant reminder of the same. However the recent declaration by Microsoft that Windows 10 will be last in the series of Operating Systems (OS) seems to go against this well accepted norm. It is a significant milestone of sorts, this announcement.  Microsoft so far had relied heavily on sales of OS, Microsoft Office and more recently SharePoint Server as their backbone. Newer versions every few years was the way things had been all these years. If I look back, I started my career with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the year 1995, which was a significant improvement towards graphical user interface based working experience. Then I worked on Windows 95, which added preemptive multitasking and then on Windows NT that introduced the UNICODE character set. Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium edition (that actually disappeare...