Bits and Bytes from my Life

Today I heard about this from my friend read a bit about it. Sounds to be interesting.. Will read and write in more details about it.. In short a model where you can change your requirements even till the last day of development… Cool Stuff. That is how all the customer driven projects are run…

http://agilemanifesto.org/

For last week or so there have been heavy rains in Mumbai. Last I heard was around 36 inch of rains. I was not able to get in touch with my parents for 3-4 days. Whole city was under blackout, there is now drinking water and everything is flooded. Finally today telephones lines started working. My dad called me today and finally I was able to getin touch with them. Luckily my parents and in laws were safe. My dad is so impatient, He actually went on a walk under heavy rainfall to assess the damage caused. He was telling all the details about the damage like one Santro was hitting the electric pole and was damaged so badly that it was finally handing like a tire with the pole and some endless stories… I hope things come back to normalcy soon.

Finally however prepared you are and how much ever you may think about urself as a human race… Nature is the biggest force around you. Nature is the one who governs this earth. This has been proven again and again.. Take recent examples of hurricanes in florida, Sunami in Asia or these rains in mumbai…

Today I recieved courseware and instructions for the first semester. We have to read the CompUSA case study and there is a lot of information to read thru. Should be fun. I read some stuff but have lot to read. Especially the CompUSA case study which is like 24 pages…

I am already excited to start the course now.

Today we had our first golf class. My friend who was going to take lessons with me dropped out today. But I was able to convince Swati to join. She liked it so much that now she is more excited about the lessons. She was doing great today. Driving a golf ball is not as easy as it seems. In 30 minutes my back was sore and I was sweating like anything… I need to seriously start excercising now… But Golf is fun… Maybe now we will have to drop the music classes. Lets see. Maybe once we settle down with our golf, my UNC and Gym along with my office we will plan for music lessons…

Most important analysis a manager has to do is that of oppurtunity cost. How much is the value of x$ if you invest it today compared to keeping it in Bank and not doing anything with it.. If you spend 1000$ and have chance to get a business of 100000$ it is more important to spend it rather than preserve it and loose its current value also…

Company: Solectron
Time: Sept 2001
Location:San Jose,CA USA
Project: Integrations
Website: http://www.solectron.com

I arrived at San Jose after staying in Salt lake city for few days. Milind also joined me from Japan. We both went to meet Solectron management. I don’t remember the names now it has been long time. I should have the names in my email history. Anyway, Solectron uses Baan ERP and they had problems with integrations and we wanted to sell them OpenWorld, which is integration technology for Baan. We did a good job. Milind is great in selling OW and I am good at demonstrating the technology. Solectron was impressed by the solution. Later they did implement OW in there environment…

Company: Boeing Company
Time: Sept 2001
Location:Salt Lake City,UT USA
Project: Data Collection(Bar Coding) requirements gathering
Website: http://www.boeing.com

We had almost completed our work at Foxboro. It was go live week and Isac and Rakesh were there to handle the site. So I was asked to meet with Boeing at Salt Lake city. This is a spare parts division of Boeing. They were looking for a data collection solutions. I had to gather requirements and come up with a design for them. I had meeting scheduled on the one of the worst days in the history of US that is 9/11. I was getting ready in the morning when I saw the most unfortunate events of 9/11 on TV. I knew the meeting was not going to be there. I went to Boeing site next day and we had meeting on 9/12 or 9/13 and I gathered all the requirements. Boeing is a great company. My main contact Mark is a amazing guy.

I was stuck in Salt lake city for few days before going to San Jose for meeting with Solectron as all flights were grounded.

Everyone is waiting for Gen2. Gen2 is a reader to tag protocol. This is also going to impact some of the data that is retrieved by applications from the reader. I will not go in details about gen2. You can read about it on lot of other sites. But everyone is waiting for Gen 2. All the reader companies are coming out with readers which support this protocol and it makes sense for custoemrs to wait for all the readers and tag manufacturers to come out with there implemenations. It will be atleast end of this year that these products will come out. Some of the companies will try to do a hanky panky job and try to come out with something immediately.. But look for the best solutions.. especially for readers.. Because… as someone rightly said… Tags will come and go but readers will stay with you for very long….

RFID

Company: Invensys Foxboro
Time: June-Sept 2001
Location:Foxboro,MA USA
Project: Integration of SAP and Baan e-Sales
Website: www.foxboro.com

I joined eET USA around first week of June. The first project that I got to work on was Foxboro. Foxboro is a division of Invensys which manufactures industrial control systems. Foxboro wanted to implement e-Sales software of Baan. This would be there online sales portal for all there distributors. e-Sales is a great solutions. The biggest problem faced by Foxboro was integrating Baan’s e-Sales(online sales) software with SAP. Here is where we came in pictuer. I presented the intial approach of builind a SAP connector for OW which was the integraiton backbone for all Baan products and everyone liked it. Next step was to get this connector up and running in 3 months that too I wanted to make it generic product so that we could use it as is anywhere at any site.

The integration touch points for this interface were sales orders, order status checks and tax calulation. Our eET team had 3 people onsite. Myself, Isac and Rakesh. Isac is a great guy. He is very systematic and cool headed person. Most importantly he knew SAP so that was a great help. As soon as he joined the team we realized some of the assumptions we were making were wrong but we were able to get everything in place on time. We got all the integration aspect of the site up and running in 3 months. Rakesh is the best guy you can have around. I really enjoyed working on this project.

One day when we were chating over lunch Mary the PM from Foxboro said “We work here not to make the owner more rich but to give our families a better life”. I am telling you this out of context so may not make sense but… How true…

It is simple. Piano and musically keyboard is like computer keyboard and I have been using computer keyboard day in and day out for last 10 years now. So I guess that will be easiet thing to learn…:):):) But I like guitar more than keyboard… But I will learn keyboard first..:):)