Still stranded in Montreal… drama continues…

Today when I showed up at the airport, they told me that my flight to Bangalore on Air India is not confirmed and I’m on waiting list. So they cannot let me board the flight. Apparently there is some big strike in Paris airport and Air France flights are canceled. Due to this, all the other airlines are over booked.

After desperately arguing for 2 hrs, I’m back to square one. They have provided me accommodation at a hotel and as per their plan, I’ll leave Montreal tomorrow and reach Bangalore on 3oth. 2 days later.

Because of this delay, unfortunately I’ll have to miss the Agile Goa 07 conference.

If you have experience something worse than me, please drop me a note.

Well I’m still surviving. I’m waiting in a hotel near the Montreal airport. Really looking forward to be back home, Bangalore.

In the mean time, I thought I should let you know about one of my most embarrassing moments. In Aug 2007, the Agile Alliance awarded me the Gordon Pask Award. While I was really happy to be recognized. I was also was happy that some folks trusted me and were hopeful that I can do something good.

Each year two people get this award. Brian Marick, announced my name first. All the thrill, excitement and sense of responsibility came to a standstill when I heard Brian announce Jeff Patton‘s name for the second Pask Award winner.

I have know Jeff only for a year. I met him last year at the OOPSLA conference. After the conference, we did get to spend some time with each other. Since then, he has been my mentor. I have and am learning a great deal from him, not just limited to software. I really respect him as a person and as a leader. Sharing the stage with Jeff, really really embarrassed me. I really felt small about myself. Compared to Jeff, I have done very little.

Don’t get me wrong. I think this embarrassment is good. It has really motivated to push my limits and do things that will really make a difference to this world.

Thanks to Air Canada and their amazing hospitality, I’m wondering in the streets of Montreal trying to get back to India.

Yesterday, I was supposed to take the Lufthansa flight from Montreal to Frankfurt and from there to Bangalore. A 23 hour journey. But to my surprise I realized that the Lufthansa flights were operated by Air Canada. The flight was supposed to take off at 7:40 PM EST. I was waiting since 4:30 PM at the airport. At 7:30, they announced that there was a minor mechanical problem in the flight and the flight would take off at 8:10 PM, 30 mins late. At 8:10 they announced that they discovered some problem with a part and they are trying to replace the part. [Most of these announcements were in French.] This waiting continued for another hour before they declared that the flight won’t be able to take off.

What started as a minor mechanical problem, resulted in the cancellation of the flight. Lucky, they were able to find a flight in Toronto which could be used instead. So then they told us to wait till mid night before we could fly.

They came out with 10 boxes of Juice for about 300 people. To their surprise they found that within seconds the juice was over. Then they came out with tiny packets of snacks. Which apparently was our dinner. While all this was happening, they asked us to check with them about our connections. Within matters of seconds, the line grew to about 150 people long. So I kept waiting for the line to get smaller. Finally at 12:45 AM, the line got to about 20 people long. After waiting for 30 mins in the line, they told me that there is only one flight that flies from Frankfurt to Bangalore and I’m not going to make it. [Apparently my laptop was lying to me that there are 4 flights everyday from Frankfurt to Bangalore]. So I’ll have to wait in Frankfurt for a day, before I can board the next day flight. To their surprise they discovered that for some reason on earth, I did not have a Visa for Germany. Which means, I cannot stay in Germany for more than 12 hours. [The person was telling me that it was purely my mistake that I did not have a VISA for Germany. Some place that I had no idea I would be staying in.] Anyway, they told me, I cannot travel today and will have to wait till the next day in Montreal to take the flight.

If you have not experience what it feels to be treated like “Crap”, you need to meet the Air Canada executives. The tone of the people on counter was pretty much as if I did a big sin by choosing to fly with them. During this conversation of 30 odd mins, there was not a single mention of the following words: “sorry, please, inconvince, cooperate, try, …” . It was like a commando giving me directions that I had to follow and not question.

Anyway, since I was not allowed to travel the same day, they told me to come the next day. I explained to them that I’m not from Canada and don’t have a place to stay for the day. Initially they told me that was not their problem. After arguing for about 15 mins, they agreed to provide me accommodation. They asked me to collect by bags from the Baggage claim and meet an Air Canada Agent in their office.

Without having an option, I went through the customs, argued with the customer’s officer why I was coming back, waited for 1 hr before my bag [completely wet] showed up on the belt. Finally at 3:00 AM when I reached the Air Canada office, it was closed. After desperately trying to find someone, at 4:00 AM, I finally found the next shift people come in. Took me 30 mins to explain them the situation and by then it was 4:30 AM. They told me there was not point giving me accommodation.

As insistent I’m, I argued and made sure they gave me an accommodation to stay. At this point, I realized that I did not have a reservation for the next day’s [rather the same day’s] flight. Like I did not have enough, they told me they cannot find any flights. So I’ll have to wait till 29th before they can ship me back. If you have tears in your eyes, don’t feel sorry for me. Just think about this next time you travel in Air Canada.

After all this misery, I found a manager, who finally booked me on Air India flight. Now I’ll be reaching [hoping to reach], Bangalore on 29th Oct 3:30 AM. If I survive all this, you might see another blog from me. Else, it was good knowing you all.

I think discussions within a large group does not really work. Following are the reasons I can think of:
1. Bigger the group, diverse their experience and expectations. It‘s very difficult to satisfy every one.
2. With bigger groups, it‘s difficult for people to open up fast and hence the atmosphere becomes more formal.
3. It takes time to relate to people and communicate with them effectively
4. Since it‘s a bigger group, the distance between people increases. This makes it difficult to see and hear the person clearly. We also miss-out on the body language.
5. With a bigger group, it‘s difficult to make eye contact and some people tend to drift away.

As a result of the above points
1. The discussion tends to get one sided or the group divides into subgroups.
2. It gets difficult for every one to contribute equally to the discussion and take it in a particular direction.
3. Focus of the topic under discussion gets lost very quickly

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

– Rabindranath Tagore

The rational testing solution from IBM ad on the front page is one of the most hilarious ads I have ever seen.

All these testing tools are great and have their own place. But testing is not a solution for eliminating bugs from your code. The real problem is the way we develop software. The way we code. I would take it one step further and say, the real problem is our understanding of software.
Pulling the rational vision screen can‘t help blind project stakeholders [including the project development team].

The ad says, “You can‘t fix the bugs you can‘t see”. Sure. Having an automated testing tool does not solve the problem. It only gets you one step closer to it. I would prefer attacking the root cause rather than taking a reactive step.

All said and done, bug free software is a myth.

It‘s been two months since I have landed in U.S. Recently I also moved into a rented apartment in West Chester, Philadelphia.

Before coming to U.S I was under the impression that staying alone, away from family and friends, would give me a lot more time for exploring Mother Nature and writing some open source. Well life is not that obvious.

Living in U.S has been quite an experience till now.
1. Right hand driving with the wheel on left is quite crazy. It‘s certainly more peaceful driving here. You don‘t have to look in all 360 degrees while driving.
2. Dealing with a whole different currency is also quite exhausting. There is always a thread running in the background trying to evaluate if it‘s a good deal or not. Fortunately I‘ve started evaluating things using only the U.S dollar and not bothering about the dollar to rupee conversion. Another strange thing I found was none of the products have a M.R.P [Max Retail Price] on them. Have to rely on the stores.
3. Predicting the weather is quite fun. When I landed in Chicago the sun was out till 8:00 in the evening and now in Philadelphia the sun goes to hell at 4:30 PM. The day light saving has its contribution to the whole hide and seek game. Another advice I got from a friend was to carry my rain jacket all the time because you never know when it starts raining. Two weeks back it was so cloudy and now the sun god is smiling upon us.
4. Cooking in these alien utensils with limited grocery reminds me of software projects. Always trying to solve the same old problem with different tools and technologies. Not to mention, the scarcity of resources and stupidity of some so called responsible/authorized people. Right from the pots, pans to heating appliances everything has a U.S touch to it.
5. We have to be different. Right from the electric switches to the door locks, everything works in the opposite direction [compared to what is in India]. Talking in terms of galloons and miles is also fun. Some more days before I adapt myself to this metric system.

Apart from thinking about all these things, I also end up spending most of my time cooking, cleaning/washing, shopping and driving. Experimenting with cooking is such fun, but cleaning all those vessels afterwards normalizes the fun. All this automation in house work is good but still eats up a significant amount of time. Wish we had self cleaning dust and waste.

This makes me think about the law of conservation of time. “The amount of time you have always remains constant”. Have I just found the new law which will change the world?

Have you been wondering, what‘s happening to the software field?
Have you come across any innovation recently in the field of software development, which solved one of the basic problems in developing software?

Everybody used to talk about Software leading the innovation arena and improving people‘s life. Helping people improve the way they do things and help achieve some tasks which were impossible before.

I‘m personally disappointed with the innovation happening in this field. For me innovation is solving one or more important problems in a simple way. By simple I mean simple from a user‘s point of view. The implementation of the solution might be complex, but abstracted away.

Focusing on a narrow stream of things inside the software world

1. 1991/92 The innovation of Internet : It changed the way we think of the world today, yet a very simple solution
2. 1995 The Java Virtual Machine [JVM]: “Write once run anywhere”. If you have ever worked on a porting project, you will know what this means to you.
3. 1996/97 Java embraced the Internet : With all those crazy applets and servlets, Java helped to push Internet to the next level
4. 1998/99 KVM : Java for devices. Embedded programming with Java helped bringing nice colorful user interfaces for deceives.
5. 1998 Search Engines : Goggle‘s search engine is surely changed the way we think about internet today.

Since then nothing significant has happened. We had Swing, J2EE, Java Web Start, Web Services, etc come and go. But nothing impressive.

Eclipse plugin architecture, MVC frameworks, .NET‘s CLR, etc are good ideas. But I would not term them as innovations that eased my life as a developer/customer.

I‘m seeing a trend of building a lot of applications, frameworks, language features, libraries, etc. But they are just building on the beaten path. Just trying to overcome some language/technology shortcomings. None of them really reflect directly to real world problems. They don‘t seem to simplify things to me. We are so deep into this maze of technology stack, then we have forgotten to think about the simple real world problems that software development is facing.

We still have security concerns. We still don‘t have a nice way to store and retrieve our data. We have issues with software becoming obsolete because everyday the volume of data is increasing.

Are we at the horizon of something new?

AND – Another Natural Disaster

Krakatoa, Indonesia, volcanic eruption, (August 26, 1883)
Tangshan earthquake, China (July 26, 1976)
2001 Gujarat Earthquake, Bhuj, India (January 26, 2001)
Bam Earthquake, Iran (December 26, 2003)
Tsunami, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, Indonesia (December 26, 2004)

and now…

Rains causing floods in Mumbai, India (July 26, 2005)

Hope you guys must have read about the disaster that took place in Mumbai on 26th.

Mumbai was lashed by the highest ever rainfall recorded in a century in India. The suburbs in Mumbai recorded rainfall levels of 944 mm within one day. Rainfall lead to landslides, deaths, water and power cuts, food shortages, erratic telephone links, no trains, jammed roads and the airport coming to a stand still. The break down in communication and transportation caused havoc in the city.

Official news claims over 800 people dead. But I believe the number is more than 1500. The amount of destruction and chaos that these rains and floods have caused in Mumbai is not measurable. Estimated damage to property is around half a billion Rs.

With all these events the most affected part of the society is always the financially weaker community. Today I visited a few slums in Mumbai which were the worst victims of this disaster. Lots of people lost everything they have earned and saved. Right from food, clothes, medicines, beds to televisions and refrigerators as most of the houses were washed out.

Bottom line: Never plan things around the 26th!

Looks like the latest version of fitnesse seems to be hacked!

I just downloaded the latest version of fitnesse from http://fitnesse.org/fitnesse20050731.zip?responder=releaseDownload&release=20050731

After downloading, I unzipped it and ran the run.bat file. In my browser if I go to http://localhost, it shows me the FrontPage. Everything seems fine. But if I scroll down on this page, I see the following links.

http://hair-removal.healthandlive.com
http://short-hair-cut.healthandlive.com
http://prom-hair-style-picture.healthandlive.com
http://hair-dos.healthandlive.com
http://hair-shampoo.healthandlive.com
http://long-hair-cut.healthandlive.com
http://current-hair-style.healthandlive.com
http://teen-hair-style.healthandlive.com
http://wedding-hair.healthandlive.com
http://celebrity-hair.healthandlive.com
http://black-prom-hair-style.healthandlive.com
http://hair-style.healthandlive.com
http://hair-loss.healthandlive.com
http://prom-hair-updos.somecoolpages.com

These links actually exist in the content.txt file.

Hope the fitnesse guys could make big money by advertising these links.