Useful Tips

1. Awesome Tip For Gmail Users

Let’s say that your email address is ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’, basically everything sent to any of the following email addresses will be forwarded to your primary email.

GeorgeBush@gmail.com G.eorgeBush@gmail.com Ge.orgeBush@gmail.com … … GeorgeBus.h@gmail.com

GeorgeBush@googlemail.com G.eorgeBush@googlemail.com Ge.orgeBush@googlemail.com … … GeorgeBus.h@googlemail.com

And that’s not all, you can place as many dots as you want, it can be even something like ‘G.e.o.r.g.e.B.u.s.h@gmail.com’ and you’ll still get it on ‘GeorgeBush@gmail.com’

Additionally, I just also found out that you can embed random text to your email ID using ‘+’ sign. That is to say ‘GeorgeBush+anythingyouwant@gmail.com’ can be used as your email address, as well.

One email for every purpose

Instead of using different email addresses for various purposes (work, school, friends, etc.) you can use different variations of your Gmail and filter incoming mails by ’sent to’ address. For instance, all incoming mail sent to ‘Name.Surname@gmail.com’ can be put to folder ‘work’, messages sent to ‘NameSurname@gmail.com’ can be put to ‘friends’, ‘N.ameSurname@gmail.com’ can be used for newsletters, and so on.

2.Convert Microsoft Docx files to Doc

Zamzar is an online service to convert files between various formats, docx (and pptx and xlsx) being one of them.The website is free of advertisements and the service speedy. What more can you ask for ? All that Zamzar asks for is your email address to send over a link to the converted document, and of course the original document.Just point your browser to the website, upload your document, give your email address and you’re done. No need to download any docx viewer.

SWITCH – on the verge of being WITCH

SWITCH comprising the IT biggies(Satyam, Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and HCL) of India may soon left with WITCH with the crash of Satyam seemingly very close to happen after the resignation of its chairman R.Raju admitting the frauds made in the Balance Sheet from last few years. Wooden chair over fire has to burn today or tomorrow without letting the one sitting on it to be safe from being burnt. Confession of Satyam’s chairman mentioned that acquiring Maytas was an attempt to clear the existing financial irregularities in order to continue to ride the tiger.
What comes as a question mark is : What will be the next prominent step of board of directors to safeguard the company and its image

Organizer: A new Start up Project

Software Development Methodologies Workshop as a part of our curriculum is being conducted and it surely began a chain of thought process since the start of the session. Be it regarding RUP Vs Agile or RUP with Agile, which one fits the best and where etc... Now, in the last session we (my team: Prerna, Manpreet, Rahul, Pawan and Harkul) took up a new start up project of developing an for an organization to define roles, responsibilities, expertise, current projects etc. of each employee within a hierarchy. Organizer helps in allocating tasks to employees according to their expertise or skill set. We decided to follow RUP methodology, in which Inception and Elaboration phases are complete. Thinking process initiates when I started thinking of what can be taken up as a project start up. Then head on to deciding it with my team and the work begins. We started with developing a business case and based on that we completed with the inception phase. While the critical high risks use cases and sequence diagrams were reviewed by Mr. Parag Shah, a concern stuck in our way, whether or not to show failure cases in sequence diagrams or not. Because there can be so many failure cases that our one sequence diagram can be swamped with and whole motive of drawing the diagrams is all in vain. So, we decided to make it more clear, hence our next exercise will be to show diagrams with and without failure cases and see how much time can be saved or how to identify which failure situations if not considered can turn into a high risk later on. So, stay tuned for the results..

End to an Old and Beginning of a New Countdown

A Year that was... A Year to be... A Year of hopes... A Year for a new beginning... A Year to usher... A Year to venture... A Year of delight... A Year that we invite... A Year of fresh Dreams... A Year that sure gleams... A Year of promises... A Year of surprises... A Year of joy... A Year to enjoy... A Year to forget all the pain... It is A New Year Again!! A Year that is here... Wishing You A Happy New Year!!

A new year has arrived, months, dates and days will repeat in their respective cycles. Last year has shown a flipside of the booming economies. Crashing moment of the year has been the one and only economic meltdown that took the US economy to standstill and other dependent economies to run for their survival. Everything changed with the blinking of eyes. Everyone seen newspapers flooded with the news of Lehman Brothers going Bankrupt, reasons, pitfalls and consequences. I know it was not just that but a lot more of which we have not been aware of. I have heard from people (my acquaintances) telling me that there is just few banks who came into the limelight but there were other 100s of financial institutions that turned bankrupt in US. One can found it similar to the crashing of a building floor by floor with each passing day. Bad news being followed by Good News has always kept us hopeful. Hence, after the hard hit everyone is doing whatever they can. Lets talk abt INDIA now, running through tough times. Somewhere in mid Jan.2008, it was presumed and informally declared that India will be showing a 9% growth rate, cannot be dreamt of. Though, India is facing only the slowdown not the recession but the Toughest times are here. Mantra for current life is “SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST”
So, do not lose hope and strive hard to party harder. Lets all hope that this new year comes with a new beginning. But not to forget, Learnings from the past are must to turn your future from bitter to Better to the BEST.

About Renowned RUP contd.

How to evaluate a project as best fit for RUP or not, what alterations will be required to follow RUP and Agile at iteration levels....remember the questions I had in mind! Today, I found a case of mid-sized financial institutions, adopted the RUP and wanted to tailor it with Enterprise Management concepts from the EUP, in particular they wanted to ensure that the Inception phase and Elaboration phase efforts of individual projects were supported by enterprise-level requirements, architecture, and reuse efforts. This case has also elaborated upon the alterations that can be done to RUP to make it a success. The writer has described very clearly how they started and what support did they get from the management. They were able to get ahead with the inception and elaboration phase when the issues actually started. Please refer to the following link :

http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileModelingRUP.htm#CaseStudy

I have been hearing about SOA from some time, so here comes again a puzzle of my mind: How good is to adopt RUP for SOA Methodology? But Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait too long for this answer; I found it the same night. Eric Roch, a chief technologist for SOA Methodology has a same question on one of the SOA blogs to which he answered and said

While it's possible to run SOA projects in an XP fashion, major concern is that the lack of rigor can lead to an incomplete or inconsistent process around business domains (how they are linked to form composites), the common information model (schemas representing common business objects), and interface design specifications. Since these deliverables become the basis for future reuse, process consistency is critical. It is possible to create lightweight instance of RUP as the SOA methodology for design deliverables. RUP's iterative nature and focus on architecture early in the process are well-suited for SOA. The key to success is to keep the process lightweight and iterative.

What you want to avoid though the methodology is the lack of standards being a barrier to reuse. You don't want to go back and have to look at code to determine what a service does or try to decipher an XML schema to understand its semantics. This is where a set of minimum design deliverables become most valuable. It is much easier to look at a one or two page use case to understand what a service does and a sequence diagram to understand service invocation than to look at code.

All set for getting started but you need to think about what documentation you will leave behind for future developers who wish to use your services. They must at least know that the service exists, what it does and what is the meaning of the data it uses.”

Further, he agrees to the argument that it is impossible to understand a holistic view of the end goal of enterprise-wide SOA. But it is possible to decompose SOA into manageable domains with a strategy to integrate domains and means to handle schema and interface changes through versioning. Hence, he firmly suggests that, Services documentation should include a system level use case, a UML sequence diagram to detail the SOAP message interactions (even if they are simple request and replies there are often exception messages), an annotated XML schema and the semantics for message transformation (from an external canonical message to an internal native format) if transformation is required. It really does not take much time to create these deliverables and they promote the reuse of your services.