Delhi Belly

Although a lot of people have applauded Delhi Belly as a great movie, I failed to like it. Its different than the regular India movie but it did not seem that great.

It was in production for the past few years. Overall the movie feel was pretty amateurish. I did not understand what the fuss was all about.

@Amir Khan: take your time and come up with a movie but not like this.

Windows takes over Skype

The question everyone is asking is, what's MS upto? Skype does not really fit into its profile. I think its simple. MS has realized the importance of dominating the mobile space and that is where Skype comes into picture.
Skype although not profitable, has a good fan following and available on multiple devices (a new concept for MS!) Voice calling is not the priority of mobile service providers. Wireless data access will be the future of communication.
If Skype holds ground, MS can potentially integrate it into Win 7 Mobile landscape. Adding new services like teleconferencing etc. Skype's position would be very strong.
As always, wait and watch.

Blackberry woes

Blackberry is primarily aimed at corporate users. If I have a blackberry, it is obvious that I will have a personal mobile also. Now I have to keep two mobiles with me so that I am connected to everyone.
Blackberry should have dual SIM capabilities in all their devices. This way a person only needs to carry one device and attend to calls on both personal and business calls.

Why are such simple design needs not catered to by professional devices? What are the developers thinking?

Android: With popularity comes trouble

The Android mobile platform has spread far and wide. Its the most common mobile platform now with upto 300K new handsets added each day around the world.

Its now time bot-nets, Trojans and viruses are created for this platform. Sure as expected, today there are reports of a Virus spreading in China for Android devices. Read more here.

Its times like these that I feel secure using a relatively unknown mobile platform like Samsung Bada! You may not get millions of apps but no one wants to waste time creating a virus for this.

Failures are the stepping stones to success

I often hear people discuss why someone is not suited for a particular role or may not have the necessary characteristics for a task.

We can never measure anybody's capability. Nor can we how someone will fare in a particular situation. I think we should give challenging tasks and provide necessary guidance. There maybe failures but it will make the team member stronger & motivated to outperform the next task.

Small failures can be managed correctly. After all what is management for? Hence I feel it is management selfishness to resolve failures which lead to people not getting the correct opportunities to show their caliber.

Go-out let your team members fail once in a while.

Management: Conflict resolution

Its funny how in different roles are interpreted in different organizations. It is y how the same role in multiple organizations work in entirely different capacity.

Generally one would see a Manager as a facilitator, helps functioning effectively, guides people. Based on my experience in a high performance environment work culture, the manager is greatly involved in conflict resolution. When there are two more strong entities in a project who can influence outcome, the manager's roles is to smoothen their differences.

A high performance culture can also lead to people only caring about their personal enrichment. Gaea concepts go out of the window and no one cares about the organization. It all about meeting one's targets and preferably undermining others efforts.

Work environments need to be open, free and harmonious... Keep the faith, the messiah is coming!

Firefox extension - Shorten URL (Bit.ly)

Created a simple extension to shorten a URL using Bit.ly and copy it to Windows clipboard. You can install it here.

Benoit Mandelbrot on TED.com

I studied Benoit's work when I was studying engineering and wrote C programs to develop Fractals. I was intrigued by the concept of finding pockets of order in a chaotic system.

Today I noticed his talk on TED.com. Could not resist watching it. If you do not know about fractals, nonlinear dynamics or Chaos Theory, you should watch this.

Java 4-ever

Came across this lovely video for Java aficionados: click here
Enjoy!

Release ver 0.22

Version 0.22 has been released on Mozilla website. Please install it from here.

Added two new features:
- On click on major movers its open the BSE page for the scrip
- Options window, you can add scripts in a list box.