Mahboob's Journal

Conducted a session at Aurora's Technological and Research Institute, as part of my Computer Society of India activities. The main speaker was Gangadhar who previously reported to me in the role of product development General Manager at Four Soft Limited. He is currently Vice President at Polaris Financial Technologies. The session came out of a chat I had with him late last year. There was a particular position he had to fill at Polaris and as his team was struggling to get the right person, he jumped in. Even the the task did not proceed smooth and quick.

One of my favourite lines is a Denny Cranism from Boston Legal : “Pull a rabbit out of your hat. That's the secret of both trial law and life.” This happens in the season one episode Head Cases. Alan Shore is fighting a case about racial discrimination. Heeding the sage counsel of the senior partner, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat -- in the form of Reverend Al Sharpton, who plays himself and shows up for the defendant. I recently happened to face a situation which we had to overcome so as to not lose our client to a competitor product. And I know of no politician or parliamentarian. But I did pull out a rabbit -- in the form of an Excel sheet.

Was playing with git repositories. There are two contenders : Cloud Foundry and Github. But first on the IDE : since the code I had was Spring-based (MVC and Roo) the choice is Springsource Tool Suite (STS). For Eclipse I was told that for my code, I need to do the extra step of setting up AspectJ. Why the hassle? Back to git. Cloud Foundry charges $7 per month for two users. Github charges $7 per month for unlimited private repositories and users.

In a blog post about an event, why do I have to write which sessions I attended or which books I bought? Do readers have to know? I wrote about the sessions and the books, then I thought I should delete the lines. Well, I guess, they give an indication of who I am, so I did keep them. The event was the Hyderabad Literary Festival held from 18th to 20th January. Due to work I could not go on the first day. The festival was a mix of literary sessions during the day and dance/drama shows in the evenings. The venue, Maulana Azad National Urdu University offered a regal elegance to the festival.

I attended yet another book launch event today (Sunday, 17-Feb-2013). I’d gone to Crossword at the City Center Mall in Banjara Hills with my family. There was the first reading of The Inevitable Bond , the first book by Mansi Soni . Most of the attendees were the authoress’s friends, including the anchor. They started the event with a quiz on cricket and literature, giving away 5-star chocolate bars to those who got the answers right.

Little did I realize that I have posted only one blog entry during the new year. Already a month and a half has gone. I am a lazy blogger. I need to be more diligent on blogging. But why blog? I spent something like 12 seconds thinking about it, and then typed the question in Google. From the first page, I selected three links and browsed through them.

This books recommendation was unlike any other that I read so far, so want to share with you all. It was published in EdEx supplement of The New Indian Express dated 24-Dec-2012. This is the link , but you can read it below in a better format --