Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Developing iOS Applications
I have been thinking for a while to learn and develop iOS applications but has been putting off due to other commitments. Last week I have finally decided to take the plunge and get started. I am planning to post my travelogue with notes and links to resources of this exciting journey on this blog. Join or subscribe to RSS Feed or by Email if you are interested.
Courses & Resources
After few hours of watching and reading various content available, I found that there is no place better than the Apple : iOS Dev Center to get started with developing iOS Applications. There are tons of content ranging from working samples,developer guides to full length WWDC videos delivered by none other than Apple’s own engineering staff.
If you prefer a class room style, with a prescribed direction and outline, here are some courses I found on iTunes that are teaching or have taught iOS development.
Stanford University
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Madison Area Technical College
UC Davis
Aachen University
Study Group
I am also trying to see if there is a user group or Development community in DFW area or setup a study group myself.
Fast Track
If you want to go fast track, may be this 3 day intensive iPhone Development Boot Camp that costs about $1000 is a better option. Next boot camp is just around the corner, 11th Feb, 2010.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Detecting a Mobile Browser on Google App Engine
uastring = self.request.headers.get('user_agent')Via stack overflow
if "Mobile" in uastring and "Safari" in uastring:
# do iphone / ipod stuff
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Living Social : Get The Deal For Free By Sharing It
On LivingSocial, not only you can get emails about great local deals, but you can get the deal itself for Free.
Share for a Free Deal
After you buy the deal, you'll get a unique link to share. If three people buy the deal using your link, then your deal is free.
Now that’s a great deal.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Two Microsoft .NET Developer Events in DFW, You Must Attend
If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend.
Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011
This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs.
Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011
With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi
Sunday, January 16, 2011
H1B and H-4 Visa Applications in India Plagued by 221(g) Refusals
Following up a note that I wrote a while back about H1B visa refusals and delays, here is a fresh news brief from Murthy.Com law firm indicating that H1B and H4 visa applications are increasingly rejected without much information.
Visit News Brief Page on Murthy.com
Back in 2009, I wrote “Going for H1B Visa Stamping? Be Prepared To Stay Back For A While” noting that H1B visa stamping is getting increasingly difficult and also taking time and asking reader to prepare well for the delays.
But this new note from Murthy.com is little more disturbing. Job market, particularly in IT sector appears to have picked up lot of momentum in the last few months and hopefully situation will improve in the days ahead.
If you are going for Visa stamping in India, make sure you take all required and any and all additional documentation that prove your eligibility to avoid delays and refusals.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Is Programming A Craft ?
Little long but quite a thought provoking article on whether Software Programming is a craft? I totally love the full post and couldn’t agree more but here are a few excerpts from the post that stand out.
The thing is, at one level software can be described by the utility it provides. It doesn’t matter how ugly it is under the hood as long as it delivers the goods. A programmer can show beautiful software to another programmer, but that’s where the appreciation stops for software per se.
A really great programmer (and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a handful over the years) can out-perform a doing-it-for-the-money programmer by orders of literally hundreds, delivering in hours or days what would take an average developer weeks or months.
A truly skilled programming team can deliver amazing business results in insanely short amounts of time. Let’s go after some of that! I want your experience. I want your knowledge. I want you to show me “the simplicity the other side of complexity,” to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes. It takes a real expert – a real craftsman – to see the elegant simplicity buried away inside the mess we call enterprise software, for instance, and tease it out
Source : http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/
On a related note, here is one the best quotes on Software I have ever come to know of.
Software is invisible to most of the world. Although individuals, organizations, and nations rely on a multitude of software-intensive systems every day, most software lives in the interstitial spaces of society, hidden from view except insofar as it does something tangible or useful.
The primary challenge of every software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.
-- Grady Booch ( Handbook of Software Architecture – Grady Booch )
Monday, January 10, 2011
Winter Cravings for a Hot and Spicy Biryani
![]() |
Awesome Chicken Biryani from Harsha's Kitchen |
Enjoy and have a great time.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Andhra/Telangana : Sri Krishna Committe Report (PDF, 11.4 MB)
Justice Sri Krishna Committee Report on Andhra/Telangana Issue is now available for download, link below:
You can alternately download the report and full 70MB appendix to the report at Ministry of Home Affairs here : http://mha.nic.in/uniquepage.asp?Id_Pk=584
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
20 Things I learned about Browsers and the Web
![]() |
Wonderful book for all ages by Google |
Monday, January 3, 2011
About A Resolution I Made in Year 1999
The inspiration behind this resolution was a teacher I met, a lecturer by name VB (Vijay Balachandran) that taught us English at SMVM Polytechnic, Tanuku. He is undoubtedly, one of the BEST teachers I have ever met and I consider myself to be the luckiest bunch to have that opportunity to learn from him. I will share in a separate post his way of teaching and how it helped a Telugu medium student like me to learn to speak, think and express myself in English and most importantly how he totally changed the way I think about teaching itself.
Having barely taught anything at that time, it looked like a big and challenging goal to have. Big and challenging enough that I didn't teach a single thing for the next 8 months or so. One day, while watching a commercial it struck to me to break it down to least possible or manageable size. So I did. What happened next was unbelievable. If you break it down, it will come to about 100 hours an year or roughly about just a couple of hours every week. Just a couple of hours a week. That looked a lot easier and manageable. ( Do you agree now, Marketers are pretty good at convincing you to make manageable purchases, every day! I do.)
As of today, I have taught about 1167 hours so far. Exactly, the way VB has taught us English. Not just concepts, but more focus on How to Apply ourselves and those concepts in real world context to solve problems amid real world constraints.
Its good to know 'what is' and 'how does it work', but what about 'how to apply', 'when to apply' and 'when not to apply'. How do you learn some thing in a familiar environment and apply it in a totally different and unfamiliar environment. Where to start? How to approach it? What really matters to tackle new problems?
For instance, when it comes to .NET Boot Camp, I didn’t teach just .NET technology, but what really matters to them to become great consultants and carve out wonderful careers.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
‘Thought Garage’ find its way back Home, to Blogger
Here is the URL of the new home
NDTV.com : Fact or Allegation ? Just another twisted title for sensationalism
This is yet another example of NDTV.com’s sensationalism twisted titles. The title says, as if this was a fact, woman made to urinate in pub...


-
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that on April 12 it conducted the computer-generated random selection pro...
-
There has been a lot of fuss about new Mobile Payment solutions and many unsuccessful attempts to get a pie of normal payment solutions. Man...
-
USCIS today released the final count of number of unique pieces of mail received for H1B petitions. It received 133,000 unique pieces of mai...
