Hey Google,

Look what Kamal found – you came 16th in your own search engine!

Why?
You need to catch up man!

Can you read this? Neither could I. And Yahoo! concluded that I am not a human! Eh, ok, I am not.

Whack! I am going nuts?? No. All these things in the title are related. Here’s how:

We, at Uzanto, constantly keep testing and hardening our software. We often use a technique (which we indigenously developed) called Gangtest. Basically all guys in our team pick up a module in the application and test it independently looking for bugs, unexpected behavior etc. Later, we all convene and discuss our findings and list all notable things on the whiteboard that hangs towards my left. Then the person responsible for that module has to keep track and make sure the things listed are taken care of. Normally this involves noting down the findings somewhere other than the whiteboard so that it can be used for other purposes.

Yesterday we did a Gangtest of the AJAX module that I am making. So, at the end of it the whiteboard was full of things that I had to care of. I hated the idea of noting things down. So, I borrowed my colleague Kamal’s mobile phone (a Nokia 6270; he bought it recently), took snaps of the whiteboard using the phone’s ultra cool 2 MegaPixel Camera (nice high res caps), transferred the images (JPEGs) onto my PC using Bluetooth and asked the Printer to print them. Wow. I have snapshots of the whiteboard on paper. Awesome.

Frankly, this is the best of what I have been able to get out of technology till date in terms of getting real work done. Maybe getting a laptop and WiFi and using it to work freely will be next big leap.

…
Kapil Mohan: do u have a spare laptop?
arnabdotorg: no
arnabdotorg: i dont have any laptop
Kapil Mohan: when u have…. have 2 .. ok?
arnabdotorg: waiting for apple to release ibook
arnabdotorg: what about my a spare laptop?
Kapil Mohan: u will get it when i get mine
arnabdotorg: when are you getting it?
Kapil Mohan: when u get 2
arnabdotorg: ohk
…

arnabdotorg = my good friend in need.

Well, I really didn know that! Is google indexing horoscopes?

Hey, today I heard that Google acquired Writely. This is big news. Microsoft, can u survive this knock? Ha, yes u can. But this is big one. Ain’t it?

Read here for the story on Writely’s blog at Blogspot!

More thought: So, now Google has one more product which is in beta. Hail beta till eternity. Ha.

We had some very cool stuff showcased at Barcamp Delhi 2006. One technology that impressed me was Watir – Web application testing in Ruby. Angrez Singh of Persistent Systems presented a talk on this. Watir is an open source web application functional testing tool. It drives IE like a user will do by clicking links, filling up forms etc automatically and shows the results. It currently supports IE.

Angrez has written Ruby scripts which enable this thing to drive FireFox. Great! He is using JSSh to control FireFox from Ruby. Here and here are more discussions about this.

In the demo, he actually showed how Watir was automatically filling up yahoo mail login page and driving the browser to do a login. It was cool. It was slow, though. When asked, he said that it is because of JSSh which is slow in transmitting messages. I also think so. The culprit has to be the middle man. Later I asked him what all it entails to support more browsers and how easy it is. So, he said that one needs to write Ruby scripts which will drive the browser and also a browser plugin or something which will let Ruby drive the browser.

Frankly, I was impressed by the power of this tool. Ruby itself is getting hotter day by day. And now a powerful web application functional testing tool built in Ruby. Good. This is one thing I am surely going to play around with for some time.

Whew! Barcamp Delhi happened today. And what an amazing event it was! If you missed it, you missed something. Many thanks to Amit, Jon, Gaurav and Manik for planning the whole thing. Love to Adobe for their infrastructure and great food. It was heartening to see so many people speaking on so many cool things. Knowledge was flowing in all directions. In my opinion, Barcamp Delhi is a runaway hit. Bangalore, we beat ya!

I heard sessions on AJAX, MindCanvas, RIA and FLEX, Blogging Network, Web 2.0, Open source web application testing, Blog monetization, Micro-content, Structured blogging and knowledge management. There were more sessions but since they were split between two rooms, so I was able to attend these ones only. I would have loved to blog the action live from there, but I couldnt since I dont have a laptop. Somebody PLEASE donate me a laptop (second hand/old ThinkPad/HP/Dell will do). PLEASE contact me if you are generous enough. I will appreciate your gesture!

I gave a talk on how to develop MVC based AJAX applications. Basic point was that people tend to use AJAX as a one shot fancy improvement to their existing web projects. However, to build enterprise RIAs in AJAX we need more serious thought and follow proven software development practices. So, I demonstrated how we can leverage the proven MVC architecture to build robust, scaleable, modular and maintainable RIAs. It looked like only techies attended the talk, which was expected. Going by the things that came up in QA and the discussions that it led to, I assume that the talk was well received. Here are the powerpoint slides of the talk (261KB).

I will blog more about what happened in other sessions. Soon.

Meanwhile, checkout photos from the event at Flickr. They even have pics from the booze party which happened later!

So, Barcamp is making its first foray into Asia with Barcamp Delhi on Saturday, 4th of March 2006. The theme is ‘Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff’. Cool. Venue is Adobe New Delhi campus. Very cool.

Personally, I think Barcamp is more about open-conference than un-conference. The idea is great. Knowledge flows best when it knows no bounds!

Its going to be a great great event. I will be going there and will try to blog live from there.

Read more details on the official Barcamp Delhi page.

Gaurav sums up the concept of Barcamp and things about Barcamp Delhi very well here.

If you plan to come, then do add your name to the wiki. See ya there!

A very happy birthday to Arnab. Rock on mate!