Puzzle illusion: Missing Square by readjusting the pieces…

I stumbled on this blog post today, looking at the picture, it was amazing to me and tried sometime to understand the puzzle. I finally hit the wikipedia, and found this post [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_square_puzzle ] with some more description in it.

 (image from wikipedia: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Missing_square_puzzle.svg/300px-Missing_square_puzzle.svg.png)

…. so Area of the overal diagram remains the same, area of those moved pieces remain the same, and still interesting to see how another square gets left out overall.

IE8 on the way

I was in a conversation about a web application being IE browser compatible between IE7 and the previous version. hmm…there came a silent pause and one brought up a point – shouldn’t this be a compatibility point between IE7 and IE8? I asked, IE8? is it on its way?

well, I was just looked up on IEblog and there is bunch of information about IE8 [1]. I am perhaps quite late on catching up with this. These blog entries are dated around early December 2007.  Also found an article about beta1 availability, on PCWorld, [2]via IE8.Net site. Reading up on some of these resources, it seems there is going to be quite updates to handling ActiveX controls, tightening up on security further, etc…

Image resizing tool on Vista

There was an image resizer power toy for Windows XP operating system, however that is not available on Vista OS. Over the weekend, I needed a similar tool and started looking around. I noticed a post on technet forum and there was a reference to vso [ http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/image_resizer.php ]. Nice tool, comes handy, provides the flexibility of right-click on the image and open an application feature like the way XP image resizer power toy used to be. It doesn’t seem to keep the same pixel ratio on the resize and looks a little blurred, however, it still helps for uploading onto online photo albums.

Until now, I used the other way of resizing that works great if you have an email client on the machine. Right click on the image(s) and click SendToMailRecipient, that asks for resize option, and send that email to self or keep it in draft, if you are using outlook client, and then copy over resized pictures to wherever you want. This method still keeps the quality intact even though the resolution changed to 800×600 or 1024×768.

Test post from Windows live writer

Testing a post from windows live writer. I was going over my new Dell laptop computer, and noticed this application.

Where do kids learn “Why”?

My 3yr daughter has recently learned the term “Why“. In a way it is good to cultivate the habit of asking why to know the insight and the significance of what we do. Most times, we have been brought up in the culture where “Why” was never used, just do what was told. When asked during the childhood, we were answered as “ಋಷಿ ಮೂಲ ನದಿ ಮೂಲ ಕೇಳಬಾರದು” meaning – “we are not supposed to ask the origin of Sage and the River”. Well, that has been the age and I do see a lot of improvement the way kids grow up these days. I would certainly encourage kids to know, understand what they do before getting into the task. Looking up on encarta.msn.com, I noticed this quote for “why”:

The person who knows ‘how’ will always have a job. The person who knows ‘why’ will always be his boss

 Anyways, this post was going to about my recent conversations with my 3yr daughter. I usually enjoy having such conversations with her as she started speaking more and more, at times, it makes me keep quiet that I run out of answers for her cute little curious questions. Tried to compile a few of these conversations here:

Dinner table: 
    me: V- you need to eat well
    V: why?
    me: so you can be healthy
    V: yeaah!
    me: so you are going to eat rice and lentils now!
    V: why?
    me: (silence)
    V: (not taking her eyes away from me) why daddy?
    me: you can become taller
    V: I am “ಇಷ್ಟುದ್ದಾ” [meaning: I am this tall now], why mo mo eat [why eat more]
    me: So, eat more and you can play more
    V: Why?
    me: (silence)
————————

Where is Restroom:
    When I am sitting on a couch either reading or working on Computer, she comes there and asks:
       V: Daddy,where is restroom?
       I:  you know it, please go to the restroom?
       V: no i don’t know, where is restroom?
        I: (showing her the way) Go through the kitchen, turn left near the stairs, turn left and restroom is on your left
       V: where is kitchen? ….. ok – (here she disappears) and back a few seconds later
        I: Did you go to the restroom?
        V: no – it is ಕತ್ತಲು [meaning: dark] there
        I: so go turn on the lights
        V: where is it? 
        V:  (she goes and a few seconds later), Daddy, you come. 
         I: please go, and I will follow you right away.
        V: no, you come. you come. 
        I tried to borrow few more minutes to complete what I was doing.
         V: (after pestering daddy for few more minutes, bam, turn off the computer)
         Daddy gets upset and follows the little one
—————————-

on top of these, one of my friends said, “Wait till she adds ‘but’ to it, like ‘but whyyyyy’”. Whether she is going to prefix it or not, I started saying it while conversating with her

With such a kid at home, there are more such moments to enjoy, fight, play, laugh, smile, etc etc…

January26: Republic day in India

January 26, is celebrated as Republic day in India. Back in our school days, we used to get together in a prayer hall and the present several of our physical activities to the special guest, start and end the activities parade around the school grounds, and end the 4 hours of activities with candies and some sweets. It used to be fun.

(image source: wikipedia)

See more about Indian Republic day here on wikipedia

jai hind

70mins wait for 10mins of dinner!

We went to a local cuisine with our 3yr old daugher for dinner tonight. I looked 3/4th full from outside. We still went in. We were at the entrance inside the door, it was about 30deg F outside, waiting for about 10+ minutes, but there didn’t seem to be anybody to offer us the table. We thought of deciding on our order while we were standing there, so picked up a menu to decided on that as well. A few minutes later, host came there and offered us a table. On the way to the table, we said, we are ready with our order so you do not need to give us a menu to look. He still insisted that there was going to be another person to take orders.

Well, we sat by the table. We got 2 copies of menu on the table. 5 minutes later somebody came there and took our order - 1 south indian thali and 1 mango lassi. We tried to keep our 3yr engaged asking lot of questions from her memory bank – about the time she got hurt last week and the activities around that; her activities at school since morning; about her birthday; etc etc. There was another table adjacent to us also had ordered 2 thalis for them. At a point, our daughter became a bit fussy, they tried making couple tricks with the cutlery on the table. 25 mins past, we received our 1 mango lassi.  We now had something else to keep our daughter engaged. She took few sips and she was done. 10 mins later a samosa – helped to engage her for 10 more minutes. 20 mins later, we received plates and a thali. Our daughter had a bit of naan and my wife a little bit after waiting that long there.

Eventually about 70 to 80 mins wait, and 10 mins of eating. It was about time for them to close, so the employees were quick to bring us the check and clear the payment, so that we could leave from there.

Food is usually good in that restaurant. We used to go early evening or for a buffet but it was around 7:45 that we went to the cuisine tonight. I often enjoyed the buffet in this restaurant.

Talk about customer service, it is usually hard to see a smile on employees there. They could have at least cautioned us about the approximate wait time. Or Perhaps, we should have asked them when we were directed to a table or when we placed an order. Well, a lesson learned for the next time in a similar situation

It was fun though spent quite some time there.

On another positive note, my wife said, “hmm… it is probably a prep for us to learn how to keep our 3yr old engaged on our upcoming (long) air travel in next few months.” yes – we are thinking about things we can do to keep her engaged for about 24 hours of air travel.

101 ways to improve communication

I am currently listening to the audio set – 101 ways to improve communication skills – by Jo Contrill and Bennie Bough.

 (image source:  http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21XK8S753BL._AA180_.jpg)

It has ready to understand and implement steps explained with
(a)title
(b) Meaning
(c) coutcome
(d) action items

Audio has been categorized into 3 sections – Communication, Speaking and Writing, General Tips.

Several of these I just listened to :
a. Know what you want to say
b. Control Fear
c. Stop talking and Listen (Listening Skills)
d. Think before you talk
e. Believe in your message (talks about conviction, passion)
f. Repeat major points
g.Find out what your listener wants
h. Define Acronyms
i.
j.

Rather than listing all the items here, I would encourage to listen/read this book for simple, easy to understand and implement steps. They also shared several techniques to use during communication process for clear and effective communication.

{tags: communication}

Traveling in India – Perspective

I stumbled upon Steve’s blog few days ago. Reading one post about his travel log about Mumbai and the other about the Diwali celebration, made me read more of his travellogs. Since then I had a chance to catch up on few of his blog posts there. Being from west, he has described his perception and has shared his day-2-day experiences from smaller shops, restaurants, railways, cities, farm lands, celebrations, traffic, etc etc. For people like me, although being from the same land (from south of India) not traveled towards central or North or East or west of India, it is good to read about others’ experiences around the country. The most I had been to was on a 3 day trip to Mumbai more than a decade ago. I am sure lots of things have changed since then and there will be tremendous change in another decade, with the amount of development happening all around the country in terms of infrastructure, etc.

Team Foundation Server: Reporting

While working on VSTF reporting features that i needed to use for my projects, I was going through the MSDN sites to learn more about the concepts. I came across this blog post with steps to create Excel – TFS reports and with videos to help beginners to understand better and follow the steps.

Tutorials on VSTS Rocks is another resource to learn more about Team Foundation Server.
MSDN is another resource with much more information to start with.  [link]

I am looking for few more resources on web to learn more in terms of Report Designer and integrating .rdl’s with TFS team projects, etc. It is going to be interesting for next few weeks for me to learn these.

Readers: if you have any resources (learning material, code samples, etc) for TFS reporting, please feel free to email me [esaarem at hotmail dot com] or leave a comment here.