I have registered a domain www.raasukutty.com. So I am moving this blog to the new domain. Everything remains the same excepting the design and the URL.
Continue visiting and reading.
Thank you all!
As a candidate, you attend a lot of interviews and as a result, tend to have quite a lot of offers in hand. But before choosing one among them, there are quite a lot of things to be considered. You may be looking for a change for a variety of reasons like monetary hikes, different role, escape from a management you consider sucks, etc.
Check with the people working in the company about the company, its work style etc. Ask a few questions to the interviewer during the interview or to the people after the interview. The question can be:
1. What do the company specialize in.
2. Why would he/she want you to work for them instead of his/her company’s competition.
3. What will you be your role and responsibility in the company if you take up the offer.
You would need to know about the average intelligence of the people working in the company and how they find the work. This is more important than it appears to be. Always people tend to grow in a company where the average intelligence of the people working around them is a little higher than them. They are into a challenge where they are supposed to perform better, thereby getting a chance to improve oneself. Also ensure that the intelligence is not too high, because you will find left out in a race between the rabbit and the tortoise. Find a company where the challenges will appear realistic.
Ensure that the company work offers you a good work-life balance. “All work and no play” is not what you expect. You must find your job fits in properly in your life. (I say, your job should fit into your life, not your life into your job). Everyone wants to work for a living and not live to work. This should be taken into consideration while making the decision. All companies say that they work from 9 am and 6 pm and their employees stretch if necessary. What if the stretch is on everyday. Then you tend to lose interest soon, tired and wanting a change. Talk to people in the company and in the project that you will be allocated to and make the decision. The company should be flexible enough on the timing, to accomodate your needs.
A good company provides its employees the best environment to work in. A clean and nice looking workplace is one that brings the mood set for any developer to start work. A separate cabin, comfy chairs and a powerful system is what everyone expects. These are the things that make you look forward to working. Ability to express ideas, easy people and a feeling that your voice is heard in the management is what makes one to continue with any company.
Lasty, a good compensation. Money is one thing which drives people, but it is not the ultimate goal. You tend to be first attracted towards a company by the salary they offer, but it is not the only thing that will sustain your interest. So keep monetary gains as the last reason when choosing a company. What if, they pay you lots and you are supposed work 16 hours. What is the use of earning, when you have no time to enjoy?
So decide wisely! So that you don’t start regretting the decision after joining!
I had challenges in understanding the documentation for installing and configuring CruiseControl.Net with StarTeam as the souce control in a Vista system running IIS 7. Finally I have successfully set up cruise control to work. I am listing the steps to get it working.
Step 1:Grab a copy of CruiseControl.Net from here. Run the setup. As a part of the install, the setup installs the ccnet server and a webdashboard.
Step 2:Once installed, to get the webdashboard up and running, fire your browser and type. http://localhost/ccnet (this is the default virtual directory on install. This points to the $InstallFolder/webdashboard folder in your build server. If the system is running IIS5 or 6, then you will see a CruiseControl.Net page, in IIS7, an 500 error is thrown. To resolve this issue, proceed to Step 3, if no issue was encountered, proceed to Step 4.
Step 3:Run the followin command as an administrator. Note: Here ccnet is the virtual directory which points to the physical location of webdashboard in the system.
%SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd migrate config "Default Web Site/ccnet"
Once the command is run, then just restart iis and browse to http://localhost/ccnet. It should show the CruiseControl.Net dashboard.
Step 4:Next step is to configure the ccnet server. Open the ccnet.config file located in the ’server’ folder of the install directory to edit.
Project Section:
Define the project section. The project name can be any identifier not necessarily your project name. This will be used by CruiseControl.Net to recognize your project.
Source Control Section
In my case, the source control was StarTeam. Various properties like login credentials, project etc, are to be set.
Executable:Path to the ’stcmd.exe’ the Star Team command line utility.
Project:The name of the Project as defined in Star Team, that has to be extracted.
UserName, Password, Host, Port:Star Team Server connection setttings.
Path:Path from which files have to extracted from StarTeam. Example: Consider the Project root folder in StarTeam is “Test”. Let the project and solution files lie in the hierarchy “Test\TestProject\MyProject”. To pull the project files and solution from this location, specify “Test” for project and “TestProject\MyProject” for path.
Override Folder Working Directory:Path to which the files from Star Team are to be checked out for the build. If not specified, the original working folder specified in the StarTeam will be used to extract the files.
Auto Get Source:Specifying this to ‘true’ will allow CruiseControl.Net to automatically check out files from StarTeam
fileHistoryRegEx:I had to make a change to the Date regular expression, as my regional settings was configured to English(India), wherein DateTime is specified as DD-MM-YYYY HH:MI:SS (IST). I had to change this, since I got a Format invalid:System.DateTime exception during the run.
TimeOut:Specify the timeout for StarTeam polling.
Following is the complete listing of the starteam configuration block.
StarTeam
MSBuild section
I used MsBuild for the build task. Following section explains the properties involved to get the MsBuild setup for CruiseControl.Net.
Executable:Path to the ‘MsBuild.exe’ file in the system.
Working Directory:Location of the files to be built. i.e., Location to where the StarTeam extracted the files that need to be built.
Project File:The .proj file or the .sln file that needs to be built.
Build Args:Specifies additional arguments passed to the msbuild.exe.
Targets:Actions to be done. Here I wanted Clean’ and then ‘Build’ done on the Solution.
Timeout:Time after which error message will be displayed if there happens to be a failure to invoke the build.
Logger:Location of the logger assembly that will be used to produce the build result.
Following is the complete listing of the msbuild configuration block.
MS Build
Triggers Section
Triggers section specifies the time and condition when the build of the project had to be invoked. During intital setup for testing, set the buildCondition to “ForceBuild” (forces a build), and once the testing is done, change it to “IfModificationExists”(does a build only when a modification is detected).
Following is the complete listing of the Triggers configuration block.
Triggers
Step 5:Run the ccnet.exe application located in the ’server’ folder of the CruiseControl.Net install location. The code will be pulled from the StarTeam to the location specified and the build should proceed. The results of the build are stored in the $InstallFolder\ProjectName\Artifacts\ms-build.xml file.
Hope this helps.
I was in my hometown, Neyveli for the Deepavali vacation some two weeks back. Sitting in the garden, in the silence of the morning, I could see a lot of birds looking out for food, chirping and making the scene alive. Four squirrels were fighting over the left overs. It was nice watching them. I felt light then, a joy that can’t be described. Feeling of oneness with nature.
There are some things that money can’t buy. One among them is this. Living in the city, I had long forgotton the charms that nature provides. A part and parcel of city life is pollution, noise and commotion. Here the most important entity becomes, money, work and speed where people themselves get forgotten. Must be the curse of city life everywhere.
This is a follow-up to the previous post on Diwali. I enjoyed it well. Lots of crackers and fireworks to play with, lots of new dresses so that I could change every one hour, lots of TV programs to watch, lots of friends to greet and share the joy of the occasion.
But, I missed out one major thing that completes the festivity. The snacks. My mom had prepared Vadai, Suliyan, Somasa, Murukku, Mixture, Ola pakoda. She had ordered for other sweets like Jilebi (Jangiri), Baadhusha etc., The day I left to my hometown, I ate at a road side shop, that left me with food poisoning of the worst degree. I could just watch everyone eating. I was on just Idli’s and Rasam.
Waiting for it to get over soon, so that I can feast.
Happy Deepavali!
I am leaving to my hometown to celebrate Deepavali with my family and friends. Happy Deepavali to all netizens.
Diwali Lights
Let Light destroy all the darkness out of your lives.
Yesterday, I was in those slog moments (when you feel to do nothing).
I just swithced on my PC to hear some songs. Keeping the volume full on my 5.1 speaker set, (not bothering the neighbours of course), I was just lying there on the bed hearing.
The song was ”Malarodu Malar ingu magilnthadum pothu”‘ from the film, Bombay by A.R.Rahman. Simply superb. It can only composed by such a genius like him.
The music, the voice and the lyrics… Soothing, insiring and comforting all at once. I was lost. Next song on the list was “Yenmel Vizhuntha Panithuliye”‘ from ‘May Madham” againg by A.R.Rahman. Stupendous! No words to describe the feel.
What could have been running in A R R’s mind when he was composing the songs. How did he choose on what instrument should be played when (I really could not guess a lot of instruments played over in it) but it was a great arrangement. How comes he chose the right person to render the vocals. Simply A Genius is what I can say.
These two songs changed the mood of the day. I followed it by hearing to ‘En Kaadhale’ and ‘Vennilavin Theril’ from ‘Duet’ .
Geniuses are born! Not made!
As a part of my recent Cardio routine at the gym, I noticed a lot of difference in the units used in a lot of the machines. Being an instrumentation engineer by the degree I hold, it disturbed me a lot and I wanted to know actually what the units used indicate.
The treadmill read the unit in kCal (kilo calorie). The cycle read the unit in Cal (Calorie).
A unit of energy is calorie. This is what is used in physics and sciences. In nutrition, food and exercises, it is quite different. The unit of enery is measured in kCal or Calorie.
1 kCal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calorie.
So the next time you notice Cal in the gym, remember this!
Here goes my geek code as from www.geekcode.com
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/IT/S d+()@>- s:+ a----- C++$ UL P L+ E--- W++ N- !o-- K- w++$ O-- M- !V-- PS PE Y PGP+ t !5-- !X !R tv+ b++ DI D G e++ h-- r-- y--
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Edit: I found a site where you can generate it easier without a hazzle, the Code of the Geek Generator. Hope you get it!
Starting out on the Open Source fever, I installed Mandriva, Suse and finally have settled with Ubuntu after two days of fighting over which distribution to go with. But Ubuntu doesn’t ask a lot of questions during install, about what to install and where to install grub etc.
After installing Ubuntu, I saw that it had not even install gcc libraries but had installed the gcc compiler. Also, the default operating system to boot into was ‘Ubuntu’ instead of Windows XP. As I and my friends use the same machine and they have no liking to Linux, I needed Windows to boot first. During the installation, I was not provided the option to choose.
I wanted to change the default boot option in grub. I had to edit the ‘menu.lst’ file located in /boot/grub manually. It does not allow to edit as the permissions for the only user was denied. The concept of ‘root’ user was not there, as I was not requested for the creation of a root user. I just created a user, and ubuntu assigns super user privilege to this user.
To switch users, the ’sudo’ command was to be used instead of ’su’.
Finally, all set and working. Still to install ruby, mysql, python, vlc.
