Kivela

So well here we go then,

a roundup of my first 24 hours of Chennai (India).

It started at sunday evening when my wife and I decided to stay up until 4 o’clock instead of resting a few hours because we thought the mini-sleep would wreck me more than sleeping nothing at all. I still believe we are right on that part.
We left our house at 4 o’clock, arrived on the airport around 5 o’clock and I borded around 6h35.

The emotions of that moment were way bigger than I would have expected because suddenly you realise how long 3 weeks are when you have to leave you’re loved one behind. Already miss you baby !

At 7h05 the plane departed in Zaventem and from 8h05 till 10h40 I sat in the business lounge in Frankfurt after which the plane left to Chennai. This plane was way bigger than any other plane I previously boarded. (Boeing 737-400 with these luxury business class massage seats) I arrived in Chennai at 23h45 (Chennai time). At that hour it is still 30° here because it doesn’t cool down here at night.

It was around 1 o’clock that I was properly settled in my hotel room.

Do keep in mind that between 24h and 1 o’clock I got tricked twice !
The normal tourist trap so I heared today.

1) The hotel driver took me to the hotel, mentioned that he always received a tip, at which point I handed him over 10 rps. He got mad and said it wasn’t enough at which point I started to feel inpolite and gave him 50rps. But he didn’t give back my 10 rps. So he left off with 60rps of tip.

2) The bellboy (the guy who carries your suitcases) also asked for a tip, at which point I decided to give him 50, but handed over a 100rps bill (didn’t have anything smaller) … big mistake … he didn’t have change and left off with 100rps of tip. After feeling really f*cked I than setup the internet connection and talked to my wife via (video)skype.

Although I was terribly tired at the moment I couldn’t fall asleep until 4 o’clock.

I had asked to wake me up at 8 o’clock, but at that time I was already showered and up for more than an hour. I do believe this lack of sleep will wreck me within a couple of days. So after the breakfast, which was nice with some bacon and pieces of fruit with some weird kind of mixture between rice and spaghetti and some spices, I left the hotel determined to walk to work for the first time.

… About 15m further I decided that was not going to happen …
I’ll take a picture of traffic and rikshaws soon, I didn’t think anything special would happen on the way to work…

Traffic does require some getting used to and at this time it didn’t seem wise to try it out already. The roads don’t really have pedestrian lanes like in Belgium, and if there are any, it will only be for a meter of 5 before there is a market stand or a big pile of trash on it. So I decided to try my luck and take an auto-rikshaw. The driver tried to hussle me (again) by charging 5 dollars and after 2 minutes of discussing he decided to do it for 50 rps. (which is devided by 4 more or less)

I then arrived at work, somewhat early to Indian standards and started to get my workplace up and running. Which does involve some work here…

My Indian colleagues are really friendly and willing to help me out on the normal day to day things like where to go, what to eat and also for the friendly chit chat now and then. This is really a big difference to the impression I received after the first 3 Indians I met !

One of the guys explained to me that normally a riskhaw charges 7-10 rps / km for locals, so my trip shouldn’t have cost more than 20 rps. He then said that next time I should make sure I try to do it for 30rps, which I will try. One thing you should keep in mind is that they never have change if you are a foreigner. So be sure to pay the amount you decided because there is a no-change-ever rule present here.

Another colleague explained to me that a normal cab driver makes around 50rps for 4hours of driving. So my tip of 60 was really way out of direction and a bell boy should be glad with 10-20 rps and certainly not a 100. But they al laughed and said it was a common thing, the default mistakes one makes in the beginning.

The colleagues here are really interested in our home country but are also proud of the cultural things India has to offer. One of the colleagues drove me home in his really nice car, which is really a seldom thing here definitely the way he takes care of it, after we had an ‘independance day party’. India is independant for 60 years and this was a reason for a small party. Which means everybody comes together, sings the anthem, drinks a fruit juice and eats some local sweets and then leaves.

Tomorrow I will try to visit some cultural belongings of Chennai together with 2 Belgian colleagues I just met here since it is a national holiday here in India.

Some thing I learned today is that black coffee isn’t necessarily ‘black’. I ordered a black one today at work and received a cup with 2 spoons of black powder with hot milk over it :S

Something that I also couldn’t figure out was at the toilet in Chennai there was a guy cleaning his tongue. This was truly and odd sight for me. I have found a picture of the device he was using, and no I didn’t take a picture myself

At the moment I only have some pictures from the hotel room and the view from there but I will take some better ‘Chennai’ pictures soon. You can find the Chennai Room album here.

Filed under: Chennai on August 14th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

I searched for this thingy quite some time so here is a quick tip.

If the startup sound of your macbook, iMac or any recent mac computer starts to bother you you can turn it down (or mute it) with following tool: Psst.
It doesn’t get any easier then this

Just download the dmg file, fire it up, choose the volume of the chime (muting is also possible) and voila !

Filed under: Tech on July 9th, 2007 | No Comments »

We went to Rock Werchter this year (since Marily Manson, Pearl Jam, The Chemical Brothers, Metallica, … were coming) and due to popular demand I decided to upload most of the pictures we took to my Picasa account.

You can view them over here
A buddy of us, Erwin Humblet, took a lot more pictures this year, his pics are to be found over here.

For more information about Werchter visit following link

Filed under: Multimedia on July 7th, 2007 | No Comments »

I had the pleasure to be invited to the architects council yesterday,
which was presented by Philippe Destoop and had as primary subject OBA’s,
also known as Office Business Applications.

Microsoft recently set up a blog concerning the council at blogs.msdn.com/architectsrule and Philippe just updated the blog with the latest info on the new OBA reference application pack for health plans.
They already released a pack for loan administration (amongst others) just to prove that these application packs don’t only cover ‘hello world’ or ‘currency converter’ examples.

So what are OBA’s ?

This definition is solely based on my perception after reading the articles on the microsoft architect journal and the meeting yesterday, so please do correct me if I’m wrong…

Office business applications are what Microsoft detects as the need for businesses all around the world to manage the complex knowledge people are storing in local excel and word files. Or as we would put it, IT minded people as we are, in a mainly un-controllable, hard to scale and highly un-automated storage. Microsoft consultancy services (and all other mainstream IT’ers) around the globe are faced with the complex challenges of migrating these ‘tactically placed solutions’ made by programmers with an awful lot of business knowledge to process driven, load-balanced, scalable and managed strategic solutions.

A quick example to illustrate:

Some companies have applications in MsAccess which contain over 50,000 lines of code or MsExcel files of over 2Gb, updated and managed over years by ‘end user computing programmers’ and then at some point the application ‘explodes’ and the strategic solutions people (read architects and business analysts) are called in to design a solution that scales better, but with the same ease of use and extensibility!

Until recently the only solution (provided and supported by Microsoft) to be made was to set up a strategic solution, being a custom-build tool to do the job, or buying in on a package containing the required logic.

The problem however remains that these applications are harder to cope with than the office tools people are accustomed with. Business people do like the office package, alot! There is nothing as easy as to update an excel file, include some macro’s and complex formulas, add some fancy graphics and go to a customer and sell your product. The problems the strategic solutions will have to tackle at that point, for instance high grade of unpredictable customisation, occasionally connected scenarios etc are really hard to tackle.
Or when in place require a great mind shift from the ‘business side’.

So Microsoft reflected about it and tried to tackle the problem thinking primarily about the end user, the customer, the business … They came up with a set of tools/ideas to implement these complex strategies and presented them to us yesterday in an open discussion.

So what did they present?

They came up with an interesting approach to tackle the problem from and end user view. Namely use the new tools/bits/parts Microsoft provides you to create a manageable layer on top of your LOBS (Line of Business) applications.

They started pointing some problems with a pure SOA approach (on this subject ofcourse), namely that services are still hard to relate to business activities. So add an additional layer of flexibility called a ‘process tier’, which can be an entire enterprise service bus or an easy to use (still a little hard to configure at the time however) component called the Business Data Catalog. This will provide you a caching enabled, read-only (for the moment) view on your ’strategic applications’, an give you the opportunity to handle this data within word / excel apps.

Say what ?

Indeed, this abstraction layer will provide you data from SAP / Siebel / Oracle / Mainframe applications and databases and an easy way to handle these within smart documents / smart tags and action panes.
In other words: The user will be able to fill in a Word/Excel document in a process driven, manageable way.

So far all was looking perfect.

Then they hit a topic which troubled me, they provide ‘patterns’ and related these to the design patterns of the gang of four. However in the presentation it looked a bit like a showcase of what the new 2007 office system could do for solving your business needs. Although respectable, the fact that they tried to relate to the GoF troubled me. So when asked for my opinion, or to be precise when the ‘discussion round’ started and I couldn’t stop myself anymore
I tried to point Philippe at the fact that although these solutions look really well and most business are in fact eager to receive such apps, the term patterns was either confusing or the presentation/slides didn’t reflect what they where trying to do.

For me a pattern is an in-field proven solution, loosely coupled with any technology/language/toolset which provides an answer to a well stated problem within a given context. (*)

This however was not met in my humble opinion, the solutions were given and working samples will be provided (which is a plus ofcourse), but the actual problem / context was not clearly stated making it hard to figure out which pattern is thé best solution.

Don’t get my wrong, I think the idea of listening to your business is the best approach to providing software with an added value. I do think however that these ‘components/parts’ still have a life ahead of them before they become ‘patterns’ with major adoption. The problem for starters is that these solutions are based on technology, namely office and to be more precise 2007 office system.

My 2 cents:

Providing a clearly stated problem within a context and stating the concept of your solution with pro and cons and then showing a technology driven sample would already help …

I do think the council was providing a clear view of what Microsoft is targeting in the near future and the counter-view of what architects in the BeLux believe are the troubles ahead is a good starting point for building stable/manageable applications / structures.

Some points still remain on the agenda for the next time namely how to manage these newly created smart-documents and applications ? When will the Business Data Catalog be capable of providing read-write access to your strategic apps ? What if your big company can’t update all workstations to 2007 office system in the near future ?

I feel confident however that these problems / subjects will be tackled …

(*) As I was trying to make my point I had an embarrassing moment, I was busy trying to state that the gang of four wrote the book while SmallTalk was booming (sort of) but that the patterns remained usable for all these years. While I was saying this, in my head I was already trying to state that the way it was presented made it hard to do this. At a given moment I paused because I thought somebody wanted to react on my comment (but didn’t) and I finished of my sentence. … awkward silence … I then realised I finished a sentence I didn’t even start saying ….

Filed under: Tech on June 22nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »

If you own an azerty mac keyboard you must have noticed the lack of the following keys:

\ { } [ ]

Quick tip:

\ = alt + shift + /
{ = alt + (
} = alt + )
[ = alt + shift + (
] = alt + shift + )

Just so I don’t have to tell this over and over again to the new adopters…

Filed under: Tech on June 20th, 2007 | 13 Comments »