Found this and had to blog it. If you do not understand the french (no pun intended) take a look at the notes on this Flickr entry https://www.flickr.com/photos/12538148@N00/100864754/
Now am waiting for the spoofs to pop-up!!
Category: Live Journal Entries
Do me and I’ll do you
Would like to see if this really works https://kevan.org/johari?name=tariquesani
Leave a link in the comments if you want me to do the same for you, of course you can be totally anonimouse and screw the results but be a sport and let the system work 😉
V – day!?
Guess we are married for too long, I remembered only when the bank called Swati and told that the client’s payment has come in… been playing around with the Yahoo! UI Library it is pretty cool but I do not think that we are going to drop what we already use, the Y! library is about 8 months too late. Besides, it does not have anything drastically new in terms of widgets or for that matter ease of programming.
But if you happen to have lived beneath some rock till now and have not tried your hand at the so called *web2.0* (I hate that phrase) you can start with this one – lots of documentation available.
I would really like to see this expanded into a complete widget toolkit, right now it looks like the widgets were put in as a second thought to differentiate it from the current world favourite Javascript framework – https://script.aculo.us
BTW, if you happen love AJAX (damn! another buzzword) but hate to do all DOM rewriting manually and further hate writing JS in your PHP or vice versa – try out https://taconite.sf.net
A conversation and some more
Swati: Who are giving Valentine gifts to?
Aasim: No one!
Swati: Why?
Aasim: S******i has gone mad…. she was always mad now she has gone worse
Swati: So why not An****a?
Aasim: sigh…
Me: She is just too good… better than him 
Swati: Is that true?
Aasim nods in assent
Swati: Then it is great, you always must pick girlfriends (partners/wives/spouses implied) who are better than you!
Me and Aasim – Speechless
Sometimes I really wonder what kind of mess we are making with that kid’s mind.
And now for the weekly summary – Aasim was not well for most of the week due to a viral infection but is now better, once again we did not have to resort to any antibiotics (read his immune system resisted secondary bacterial infections well) and am happy about it.
Yesterday I went birding with some friends to Wena Lake. Swati stayed back with Aasim, got my first pictures of Kentish Plover and Small Pratincole and we counted an approximate of 15000 ducks mostly Red-crested Pochards. There is also news of Bar-headed Geese at a nearby lake will have to go and get some pictures. An idea for publishing “Out of distribution” paper was brought up – I already have records of at least 8 such birds with pictures but the question is who will write… these days I can’t seem to write anything more than half a page on any subject.
Rapture!
The week went by in trying to get things done and the Sunday went by trying not to do anything! For a moment I could almost understand the rapture or rather psychology of pleasure-pain nexus…. the week however was a fruitful one and Swati did manage to get things done (doesn’t she always 
), so hopefully this week we will be embarking on a project (project not as in coding) which is larger than we ever believe we would / could ever manage, more on that in a day or two.
Last week I discovered that a photographer of nudes is generally considered as not being very smart if not outright dumb – I had to set that right on two PHP application forums where I am active under an alias. Now don’t jump to conclusions the alias is just popularise my alternate photoblog.
Yesterday we had planned on going birding but it fizzled out, somehow since bird photography has now essentially become dependent on need for a longer lens and more time, both of which I cannot afford to spare, I don’t see myself doing that often. Yesterday I also tried something which I hadn’t done ever since Aasim was born – picked up Swati and walked across the aisle, not that she need any help. I leave the question – Has Swati lost weight or have I gained that much strength – open to speculation….
Untitled I
Suddenly it is cold! week before last it was as if we are going to have an early summer and now the temperature has dipped ushering an extended winter – I love winters in Nagpur specially sitting in the warm sun on Sunday afternoons.
It has been a very hectic past few days with Swati playing nurse/foster parent to her niece who has had an accident and then to Aasim’s class teacher who was operated upon to have her appendix removed – Swati’s verdict – She (Aasim’s teacher) is a 27 year old Aasim I guess anyone who see’s Yoda in Degobah when under anesthesia rightly qualifies as such! Swati’s also discovered that how being empathic towards the physical suffering of others can sap you up emotionally… this is something which I use to complain about when I was practicing but one needs to experience it first hand to truly understand what I meant….
Yesterday morning saw us again at the near by Wena Lake for watching birds – this time while Aasim, Swati and Raju roamed about I sat inside a hide which Raju had fashioned out for me using Ipomea branches right on the spot. I had the thrill of seeing Common Teals, Greater Cormorant, Little Ring Plover and some more waders at nearly handshaking distance – unfortunately the close proximity also meant that they could not be photographed really well 
Late afternoon turned out to be very creative and fruitful – we have finally found a new model (after interviewing and rejecting many dumb tweenagers) who is intelligent, creative (she is a Kathak dancer), 30+ and most importantly comfortable working the way we want her to… looks like the year is going to be interesting! 
OK! we are not a Sweat Shop
Got some flack for calling SANIsoft a sweat shop…
Two of my biggest clients pointed out that calling SANIsoft a sweat shop would not please their investors (heh! I did not know that you people read my personal journal)
They went on to point that you cannot call a SME which creates PHP apps optimised to take 10,000,000+ hits a day, designed to work seamlessly on clusters, designed to be easily plug-able, designed to be secure, a sweat shop. Sweat shops do not have clients who are partners with *the* biggest web companies in the world (Wow! we do all that? damn, we are not getting paid enough!)
Sweat shop also connotes that the employees are treated at just one rung above slaves. Oh well! my programmers are slaves, slaves to program what they choose to – they cannot do anything else when they are at SANIsoft – when on bench they are forced to work on Open Source projects, forced to participate in mailing lists and forced to answer mails for problems they can solve. Yeah! they are all paid once a month on the last day without fail and then given performance bonus whenever Swati can afford (5 times till now in this financial year). They are free to freelance if they have time after they are released for the day – so that way the working conditions are a shade better than a sweat shop.
There – I have set the record straight, done PR for my company on my personal journal and pleased everyone – All smile please 
Failure of your business model is not my problem
“Failure of your business model is not my problem” It is sad to tell a client this but that however does not mean that I do not understand business or business process, The following in no particular order are my few common sense guidelines
I am outright wary of clients who wants my opinion on their business model/idea. Dude I had a wonderful business idea and I am following it to the hilt right now! We wanted to be and are a “PHP sweat shop”
I prefer to take clients who are taking their existing brick and mortar business to the web – these clients usually last with you for a long time.
I know that clone of a previous big idea is not going to make it as the *next big idea“ however these clients have money to throw around – if you are ready to let go of the last installment of your payment take them.
I refuse to give discounts on my rates to a new client – these clients are usually troublesome, we however give a lot of non-billed hours to our old clients and they are thankful for it
I know that a proposition that is ”too good to be true“ usually isn’t – development in lieu of partnership/profit sharing/extra money later is always a loss making deal – want to do free development? do it for free software, the returns are worth their weight in gold (no that is not a joke or a flame bait)
I am wary of propositions which begin with ”We are looking for a long term relationship with a development company having strong technical knowhow“ – Good deals come with a detailed project(s) RFC documents
P.S. I have most probably written all of the above somewhere before – just cant remember where
Weekended
Fun started right from Saturday afternoon once the barbecue party was confirmed.
All the ingredients were just right for a great party – a few friends, great white wine (and rum), excellent prawns, lots of chicken with great marinade from Swati and crisp dried easy to light coal… sorry no pictures were taken, slept at 1am but was again up at 6am. I just can’t seem to sleep late no matter what but on the flip side it gives me a lot of time all by myself, I post processed a bunch of pictures for https://nagpurbirds.org – if you have not looked at the birds on the site I would suggest do take a look – It now has 910 pictures of a total of 181 species.
The birds some how sensed that we were home and were creating a ruckus outside so for a large part of the morning Swati and I sat out in the sun feeding all our familiar courtyard visitors, it was heartwarming to see all the old friends coming, inspecting, muttering, chirping, tweeting in excitement or displeasure. The most vocal amongst our visitor is a pair of Common Mynas…
Early afternoon we got hooked to a movie on the cable “Neal n Nikki” which we like despite the fact that the movie bombed at the box office – may be general movie going public does not like fun being made of the stuff they really enjoy 😉
After the movie Swati just did not want to stay indoors so I called up Raju and asked if he was game for some bird watching, he was! he has just acquired a new 10×50 and I baited him with my fresh copy of Ripley’s Guide, within 20 mins we were off to Wena Lake situated about 20kms away. For the first time I saw a flock of “Pacific Golden Plovers” and there were 9 of them….
Ummm, seems like awfully small number of words to describe the awesome amount of fun we had over the weekend – but thats that.
Another week
The feeling for entire week gone by can be best compared to sitting in a second class compartment of a train which is running terribly late – you cannot do anything but wait!! Everything seems to be in a state of transition the loan, the clients, projects, photography everything!!
Hopefully things will improve from today on wards.
Have got a great field guide on Flowers of Sayadhari – must make some efforts to learn at least a couple of hundred names besides “flower watching” as a hobby is easy and cheap… somehow birding seems to be taking a second seat in terms of preferences these days. It is not that we have not been moving around Saturday we went to Koradi and yesterday it was Ambhazari and Sonegoan lakes…
Among other things my programmers have taken upon themselves to (re)learn C++ and KDE programming – Checkout See https://koppermine.sf.net. It still has a looooong way to go but we are surely on the way.