Wiki - Revolutionizing work place communication!

What is Wiki>
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslink between internal pages on the fly.
Click here to read more about it..

Is Wiki the right choice for you?
Leading projects that demand daily communication between cross-functional teams to resolve issues?
Managing many projects simultaneously?
Part of a onsite-offshore or a distributed team setup?
Discussions

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then you are a victim of e-mail phobia. Walking into work every morning to see hundreds of unread e-mails overwhelms anyone. Especially when the responsibility lies on your shoulders to step in when a discussion is going haywire and your team is looking upto you. Common trend indicates that it takes about 7 e-mails on an average for a simple issue to get resolved. And if you are part of the onsite-offshore model it is another Herculean task to collate the discussion from various e-mails and send the relevant ones!

It is time to try WiKi then! This is where Wiki steps in. It collaborates content making it easy to follow a discussion than browse thr tens of e-mails to track a thread. Content is decentralized making it accessible to the relevant parties. Since the discussion is on a web page it is accessible from any where and does not require any additional software to edit the web pages. Different Wiki pages can be set up for different projects.

There are some disadvantages of using Wiki.
a) It is not the right forum where discussions require authorization or approval - but the final approval can always be done thr a e-mail.
b) The content in a page can be edited by anyone who is a user of the system. Certain WiKi systems provide administrators with the privilege to allow/reject edits to the pages. This however is less likely to happen when the users of a system are responsible. Moreover any content that is tampered with can be tracked down by viewing the change history.

All set to try Wiki?
Testing WiKi - Simple WiKi
WiKi Syntax
WiKiEngines- if you want to set your own WiKi

When I first read about WiKi, the first question that crossed my mind was, "How is it different from a group weblog?" Read this to see how

Yahoo! Mail
Mail wars have just begun. Anyone who logged into Yahoo! Mail this morning was in for a surprise. Yahoo! has upgraded its mail features with a cool user interface and 100 MB of storage. I don't see a reason why someone would now give up their already 3-5 year old Yahoo! Mail Id. I'm wondering if Yahoo! would consider giving 1GB storage to compete with Gmail. I really like this move of Yahoo! - clean sweepstake. Yahoo! has an edge over Google of not being shrouded by controversies such as breaching privacy.

Air Max - Nike Shoes

Air Max
Nike Shoes are THE best. They are so comfortable that the feel of anything else hurts my feet. I've been wearing these shoes for over 3 months now. Walking is no longer an activity, it is a pleasure and the urge to move forward arises automatically. They are so light weight that the feel of extra baggage on my legs is no longer there. I just remebered that dialogue from the movie "What women want". Mel Gibson presents his ideas for an advertising campaign for Nike- images of a lone woman running the highway. It has a punchline- Nike - No Games, Just Sports!

Favorite Five

These are my all-time favorite movies (in the same order). So it goes without saying that I can see them any number of times without getting bored -I've seen most of these atleast 10 times.

English

1. You've got Mail


2. One Fine Day


3. Stuart Little


4. Pretty Woman


5. A Few Good Men

Hindi

1. Dil Hai Ki Maantha Nahin


2. DDLJ


3. Ek Ladka Ek Ladki


4. Pyaar Tho Hona Hi Tha


5. Andaz Apna Apna

Good Bye Winter, Welcome Summer

The pleasures of summer are innumerable after the long cold spell. A very well written article on the numerous things one can do along the lake shore ..it is titled Lake Effect. Excerpts from the article about Lake Michigan,
Lake Michigan is 10,350 years old, 307 miles long and 118 miles wide; contains 1.3 trillion gallons of water; has a 1,638-mile shoreline and contains about 70 species of fish, including, of course, alewives.

Ironically, the term "Lake Effect" (as used in winter),adds to the miseries in winter making the cold seem all the more bitter than it already is! Anyways, now that summer is almost here, with temperatures soaring upto 90 deg, the Lake Shore is buzzing with activity - kids playing in the water, big cruises showing the spectacular view of the skyline from the lake, people sun bathing on the beaches and ofcourse the bikers and skaters along the trail. Waking up every morning to see the pristine blue waters is such a good feeling after having seen the frozen lake for months in a row.

In other news, my visit to the Printers Row book fair this Sunday was fine. There were too many people and very little space to move around. For the most part, only these categories of books were available (in the order of popularity) - classics/fiction, children, cooking/women and sports. Travel and Business/Non-Fiction Books consituted less than 1%.

Analogy between "directories/files in filesystems" and "packages/programs in programming languages"

The concept of organizing files into directories is an age-old concept. But also big enough to spark a discussion. It has provoked me to think and reflect on the different schools of thought. Here is the problem :

File naming convention to different formats - (viewable, printable and text only ) of a source file - Shrek_Characters.xml. How are these files used - In a website to display different views as chosen by a user.
Based on the 2 different schools of thought are the following 2 solutions:

Solution 1:

Directory
FullContent
Print
Text

File Name
Shrek_Characters.htm
Shrek_Characters.htm
Shrek_Characters.htm

Solution 2:

Directory	File Name
FullContent	Shrek_Characters-fullcontent.htm
Print	Shrek_Characters-print.htm
Text	Shrek_Characters-text.htm

Problem Definition:
As one can notice the only difference between Solution 1 and Solution 2 is the names of the files (solution 2 appends the format to the filename) . Both 'schools of thought' agree on the importance of segregating the files by directories (or atleast I assume so). The point of contention is group 1 feels why should a file name be called differently when the differentiating factor is already the directory. While group 2 feels what if a 'print' version file gets accidentally moved to 'FullContent'.

I wanted to offer an unbiased opinion though I feel strongly about Solution 1. Hypothetically, lets assume there could be thousands of such files. So I started thinking more about it, because it is not just 1 file that would be in each of these directories. This is when I reflected on the concept of packages in Java. A set of classes are grouped in to packages based on their functionality/purpose in the overall system. There could be 2 packages called com.movies and com.charcaters that have the same class called ListAllNames, for instance. The function of the class ListAllNames is to list all the names based on certain criteria. Just because they are stored under different packages, wouldn't lead one to change the names of the class. This class finally gets stored under 2 different directories called movies and characters but under the same name. To avoid class conflict is one of the reasons, the concept of packages was formed. The concept of packages can be seen even in PERL and any OOP language.
So one can see the analogy between directories/files and packages/classes.

Gene Hackman. Books.

Last evening, I saw Gene Hackman at Borders. Gene and Daniel Lenihan were there to sign their latest novel- Justice for None. This was the first time that I saw a celebrity so close.

The Annual Printers Row Book Fair event is scheduled for today and tomorrow. I'm looking forward to going there and for all you know the there will be a big addition to the collection of books @home.

Today was the worst day in probably 4 months. I was in such a foul mood when I got up this morning, mainly because even after 8 hours of sleep I woke up as though I hadn't slept a wink. The work and the meetings is not doing any good to me physically/mentally at all!

I'm all stressed and burnt out. Everyday, these 5 hour meetings and juggling my time between 3 projects - all of equal intensity is eating me up.

Anyways, I come into work and the day starts with this marathon meeting that goes on for 3 hours (POST DELETED...................)

All I need is this weekend 2 nights sleep without DTD's and tables swimming thr my head during my sleep.

Satisfying weekend

This long weekend was satisfying in all aspects despite the weather playing spoilsport.
Friday, we had a good dinner and ordered much more than we could eat. Well it was good in a way for I didn't have to cook Saturday.

Saturday morning, we set out to see the Baha'i Temple at Wilmette, Illinois. I'm told the Lotus Temple at Delhi is more beautiful architecturally. The Islamic influence to its architecture was very prevalent.

Gray and gloomy skies cast their shadow for most part of the weekend. Sunday morning, I woke up to see the enthusiastic bikers riding along the Lake Shore Drive, from my window. The event was "Bike the drive" - a 30 mile long event held very spring. Bikers of all age rode their bikes along the lake shore drive. What is significant is that there are no cars during this window and it feels exhilarating to ride the bike on the lake shore drive.

Late Sunday afternoon, as the clouds cleared up, we went to see Shrek-2. I must say it was worth every penny spent. Offers total entertainment and a lot of creativity has gone into its making! Felt good to see a good animation picture after a long time. This one, unlike the first part has a very pronounced American influence - it is more of a satire of Hollywood. Starting with FAR FAR AWAY in the style of HOLLYWOOD followed by GAP QUEEN, Burger Queen, Versarchery, something like Starbucks etc. The new addition - The Puss/Cat in Boots, was a good one. Donkey played it cool as always - maintaining its virtue of talking nonsense! This is the most memorable dialogue


Donkey: Don't I have the right to remain silent?
Shrek: Donkey, you HAVE the right to remain silent. What you lack, is the capacity.


Well, that was my weekend...

Information spreads like Plague on the web - Blogs' contribution

I was reading about the Memespread project on Wired. Meme is a unit of information that passes from one person to another person as defined in the Memespread project Analysis. The objective of this project was to determine the route a piece of information takes to be transmitted and the duration it takes for it to get popular. It is indeed a interesting thing to have used blogs to test this phenomenon. Regular bloggers will observe that any popular piece of phenomenon - be it a cool software or a game or a mpeg doesn't take more than 30 days to gain popularity! The ones that strike me instantly are the Penguin game (yeti and penguin), the big line in front of the new Apple store at Tokyo.
Some of the most popular blogs are listed here.

In other news, I'm really exhausted with the all-day meetings. It is taxing to listen to someone for 8 hours. It is a meeting after meeting and finally when it comes to doing real work, I'm burnt out! Right now I'm really looking forward to the long weekend.

Appearances can be deceptive. I looked at someone today and wondered why would someone so authoritative present himself not-so-elegantly. All it took was just a 10 min conversation with him to change my perception and more importantly be very impressed! What would have taken me atleast an hour or more to figure out took him a mere 5 mins and he presented it so beautifully and made it so simple.