business logic and products

one of the examples of how business logic defines any product was visible when I started playing with flash authoring tool after long familiarity with solidworks. Flash is used by creative professionals whose thoughts has no boundaries and does not have any constraints. They are limited only by their imagination. And the tool they will use should help them by not restraining them.On the other side solidworks is used by engineers and designers who are bound by many limitations like the part they are designing – can they be manufactured by available tools and in how much cost . If they follow some standard then parts can be manufactured easily or they can be bought off the shelf also reducing cost. In this case the tool should not allow them to go out of bound and create anything they want.

Taking simple example – A Line always remains a line in solidworks or in any cad modellar. If any end point of line is fixed at any place it will always remain there unless you remove the first constrain of fixed point. And all the following operations has to be based on previous constraints. And a circle will always remain a circle.

In flash select a line and drag it . It change its shape to something else ofcourse it is bound by some equations but still slight change in selection and completely new results which suit the artist mind who most of the time is not wanting any fixed result and is experimenting for new shapes. A circle can be changed to star depending on selected point and dragging. Create two intersecting lines and they become 4 line!!

this month – scott myers..

This month has been good in terms of peoples I have listened to.

Robert Sedgewick at Adobe, bangalore on Finding paths in graphs. A computer science professor at princeton university, he has written several books on algorithms and is also on the board of director of Adobe.

Scott myers at Dr Dobbs SD Best Practices 2007. Familiar name for any body who know c++. Author of Effective c++ series. His topic was better software – no matter what. There was nothing new but just listening to him was an experience. Takeaways were , name everything well. Make it hard to make mistakes for others using naming conventions. Utilizing c/c++ type checkings at compile time as compared to runtime overheads. Do static analysis and code reviews instead of relying totally on QA efforts.

Herbert thompson at Dr Dobbs SD Best Practices 2007. He is the author of several books on how to break software security. Did not know him earlier but the talk on security was good. Got insight into how softwares can be broken by people of other types. He showed bugs in notepad and our own Adobe Macromedia Flash.  For the first time I understood and saw live demonstration using macromedia flash player 6 – buffer overflow vulnerability and how it can cause malicious code to execute – it was interesting.

bangalore to tirupati

This weekend being long weekend we planned to go to tirupati. As usual we could not book any of the things since this was a last minute plan .We knew that there will be crowd at tirupati but remembering the experience of previous visits it was always like that. And we had 3 days so we decided to go ahead.

We started from bangalore at 5 am on friday morning by my maruti alto.The route for tirupati is Bangalore – kolar – chittoor – tirupati. We got on inner ring road, headed straight to airport road flyover , indira nagar and at the dead end took right for old madras road. After that it is almost straight . You just have to follow the signboards. One route is through chittoor town and another one takes diversion to left for a alternate route. And the alternate route was the worst patch of road as compared to rest of the road in the trip and we have to pay Rs 5 toll ! . The highway being in existence since long has lot of things for travellars unlike new bangalore chennai highway where we did not find any decent place to eat or rest. Only deterance was sudden speed breakers without any warning or coloring. And dummy speed breakers – there was zebra coloring but no speed breakers. But apart from this things and drive was fine. We stopped at woodys for breakfast which is after kolar. The roads in Andhra seemed to be better than in karnataka. Reached tirupati at 12 in noon.

We had lunch at andhra tourism hotel in srinivasa complex first floor. It was andhra style thali. Iterations of rice and dal, rice and sambhar , rice and rasam, rice and curd and then sweet dish. And the waiters did not allowed to mix and match the order. We managed to get rooms in hotel sindhu at the outskirts of tirupati which turned out the be a good value for money.

Next day after darshan we did some shopping near the temple. Down in tirupati we went to place called Shilparamam which was near the hotel. This is crafts village kind of place but there was nothing of that sort. The things being sold was nothing special and all of them you could find in your neighbourhood gift store. The entry is only 2 rs per person. car parking is 3 rs. It was a beautiful place but could have been more fun, looked like nrityagram in bangalore. There was a singing recital going on in the ampitheater with less than ten people as audience.

We wanted to stay in tirupati in night but could not get any place as all the hotels were booked for marriage. So we decided to go back to bangalore in night. We started at 8:30 pm.Decided to take dinner at woodys but it was closed in night which looked odd for a hotel on highway. Reached bangalore at 2 o clock in saturday night with enough time to rest on sunday.

jolt awards

3 products of adobe has been nominated for jolt award 2007. Adobe Captivate(Utilities) ,  Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional(Collaboration Tools) , Adobe Flex 2(Web Development ).

Looking at these – Captivate is getting visibility outside e-learning domain as a product. Flex is Adobe foray into programming world and is getting popular. Acrobat connect professional is Adobe bet for enterprise space.

Update : All these have won awards in their respective categories.(24th Mar 07)

starting blogging

After many unsuccessful tries at maintaining a blog, to keep things easy and simple I wanted to use Adobe Contribute and blogger to start my blog site. I could not get past blogger registration page. Somehow it kept me asking password again and again. I checked that the password strength was strong. I also tried to edit one of my old blogs through Contribute but it also stuck at asking me password.Not sure who is at fault but as a user I started looking out for other options.Wondering – usability and small but visible issues are more important that the technology behind the software at the end.

Referred to wiki. Settled on wordpress – with 50 mb free space. Registration went fine. Contribute also created connection successfully.

So here I am with my first blog created using wordpress and Contribute.