Achtung baby !

Achtung baby !

My current telecom project is coming to an end with a steep learning curve of good exposure, expectations & experience of the German based clients. I've a kind of inclination towards learning & understanding the customary practices of nations we deal with for project or biz development reasons. I believe in most of the scenarios it's healthier to know the social behavior pattern & rules of engagement of overseas clients.

"Indian companies are rapidly moving into Europe for business and even acquisitions. Young and highly qualified Indian managers are relocating to live and work in Europe.

"Should you end up living in Europe, knowing the local customs, manners, dress codes, dealing with neighbors, driving laws, and so forth are critically essential. Here are some broad guidelines."

This is interesting :

"As an Indian working in Germany, you could feel limped your enthusiastic bubble bursting when your optimism about a project, plan, scheme is cut down to pieces by German bosses. Germans take pride in always looking at the dark side of life. This may indicate depth, critical thinking and a certain "intelligent" caution — things that have always been very precious to the precautions German heart and the logic-amorous German head."

Read this article in 'The Hindu' to fathom brief rules of engagement, living practices with your neighbours should you end up living in Germany. The author Mohan.murti is former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany.

Bhoole to nahin..mein aapka Saurav Ganguli

Bhoole to nahin..mein aapka Saurav Ganguli

The word pathetic is inadequate to describe how pathetic India’s pathetic batting display was in the game last night. It is time we welcome back our former captain and (former) batsman Sourav Ganguly to the team. Here's why...

1. Sourav is the king of offside play. You could pay an entire month’s set-top box subscription just to watch that cover drive.
   
2. The 10 or 15 runs Suresh Raina scores, Ganguly will be able to score them with ease.
   
3. People won’t be able to raise questions like, “If performance is the criterion, why is Sehwag still playing?”
   
4. Since the Indian team’s cricket isn’t worth watching, we could at least have some Chappell-Ganguly showdowns to look forward to.
   
5. If, perchance, India were to win a game (against the likes of Namibia, Surinam, Burkina Faso etc), the dressing room would come alive, what with Ganguly’s shirt-swirling and a selection of the choicest expletives.
   
6. The Indian team desperately needs a bowler who can bat.
   
7. Sourav would attract all the criticism, and hence the others can play without much scrutiny. He is the kind of pressure-reliever our underperforming boys would want.
   
8. A better player would be given a chance to play for Bengal’s Ranji Trophy side.
   
9. Shoaib Akhtar won’t play cricket for a year; so dada won’t be anyone’s bunny any time soon.
   
10. You would be relieved of that sick commercial, “Mein hoon Sourav Ganguly… ooh, aah (ouch!) India!”
    

Thanks & Over to Vijay krishna

Jack rocks as-usual

Jack rocks as-usual

I’ve been following Jack’s Javascript UI work and it’s been quite impressive. Jack Slocum popularly known as a man behind flexing Yahoo UI to the max. You can find how famous he's in comment section of his blog.

Recently he released a DOM helper utility which provides 'more optimized insertion methods such as HTML fragments and template building'. As Jack points out 'DomHelper' clearly have benchmark performance benefits comparable to any utilities in other libraries.

"If you are doing JavaScript development, then at some point or another you have probably had to use DOM to create elements. Like everything else with DOM, creating elements can be extremely verbose, leading to bloated code and spending too much time doing something that should be simple. The DomHelper class in the 0.32.2 release provides a layer of abstraction from DOM and transparently supports creating elements via DOM or using HTML fragments. It also has the ability to create HTML fragment templates from your DOM building code."

I found Jack’s dragablelayout script kind of interesting & design-provocative. I'm currently trying to implement this interface technique in one of the offshore project. This is the way where the intuitive interface is heading towards. This surely beats the conventional way of thinking inside frames set & hacking around div's to resemble frameset interface. The draggable feature is worth checking it.

"This resize script applies drag handles to an element to make it resizable. The drag handles are inserted into the element and positioned absolute."

Why employees leave organisations ?

Why employees leave organisations ?

Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile.

Early this year, Mark, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer.
He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office,and the very best technology,even a canteen that served superb food. Twice Mark was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.

Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Mark walked out of the job.

Why did this talented employee leave ?
The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding:

If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss .Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he 's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge, experience & contacts with them, straight to the competition.

"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

Mostly manager drives people away?
HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave,but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.

When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don 't have your heart and soul in the job."

Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious,too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue
- Azim Premji, CEO- Wipro

If I've to change my profession, what I'll do ?

If I've to change my profession, what I'll do ?

I'll do this sweet job of Baby kissing.

Bangalored or Benga-lured :) ?

Bangalored or Benga-lured :) ?

"When 'getting Bangalored* has acquired a strong negative connotation," becoming Bengaluru can only be a good thing for this city."

Heard about Bangalored* but never knew it's a official word in my tiny Wordweb dictionary. I'm sure none of the Bangalorean will enjoy this status. But that's the eventual truth which we live with. Hopefully I don't want to hear- Philipined, Norwayed, Chinesed :) some day in future. Though Bangalore is officially renamed as 'Bengaluru' on November 1 this year, I'm wondering what's gonna happen to this dictionary word Bangalored*? will it be Benga-lured ?

I've heard a number of pro & pan opinions, thoughts, comments, remarks on the new name of the city where I make my life. With so many backlashes in upward era I've learnt to live with this fastest growing 'India's Silicon Valley.' This name-gaming is less a political stint but a more of ethnic & cultural naming preservation. Like Chennai, Kolkota, Puducheri to name a few.

Though dated back, it's the intersting read in the context of new name Bengaluru @ usatoday.com

* Laid off work due to offshoring of the work to India

Adobe’s Next-Gen Technology

Adobe’s Next-Gen Technology

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

What is Apollo?

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills to build Rich Internet Applications to the desktop.

Read more in adobe labs

Screenshots & more

5.5+ behave like IE7 or Firefox

5.5+ behave like IE7 or Firefox

IE7 loads and parses all style sheets into a form that Explorer can understand. You can then use most CSS2/CSS3 selectors without having to resort to CSS hacks.

The lightweight script is a single-line inclusion in your HTML/XML document. No alteration of your original markup is necessary. Neither do you have to alter your CSS.

http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

"By plugging in this script library you can have IE 5.5+ behave like IE7 or Firefox, go away CSS hacks!. Apparently this script even had attention from the MS IE7 dev. team."
- Via: Ramakrishnan Annaswamy/CD mail list.