Technical Vs Non-technical writings - Part II

This post is a follow-up of the last one on the same subject.

Now, let us come back and think about the whys of it. Why is technical stuff popular than non-technical stuff in the web? Let us take a specific example. While it is true that there is lots of information about say, surgical methods, it is comparatively smaller than any technology related domain. When considering this specific example, you should take into account of the fact that the surgical methods have been around for the last six centuries or more, but you can’t say the same with any of the technologies related to computers. Computers themselves, as we know today, are no more than 50 years old. What could be reason, then? I think it is basically because the awareness among technical writers about the web itself, its impact, its power and the benefits it will bring into the world and themselves, is much greater than non-techies. Non-techies are fast catching up, but due to the geographically wide-spread practice of surgical methods (in this example), this is not always possible. Technology, on the other hand is uniformly developed and available all over the world. Today, technology rules the world and it is no surprise that the techies are contributing much more greatly through and to its growth, than anybody else. Also, techies are heaviest consumers of the web. As you know, supply always follows demand. It is obvious that more and more information becomes available in the areas that are consumed more. It is a positive spiral.

Secondly, I think it is because of accessibility. For example, for a person who works day in and day out with computers, it is obviously easier to create a write up about anything and publish on the web. Thus, when I find it difficult to comprehend something that would help me achieve certain things at work, I don’t need to go over to any other place, and look for help. I just search for help using google or any other search engine, in my own computer. No worries.

Thirdly, information available over the web is just like any commodity which involves buying and selling. While you publish, you essentially are selling your ideas to millions of people world over, and when you search and obtain information, you are buying those. Of course, not all of such buying and selling involves money. Lot of it is free. However, there needs to be somebody who can control the entire process. Unfortunately, here again the techies excel – because they understand the process better. Simply because, they are the ones who created these processes, in the first place!

Though the web doesn’t restrict any group of people from accessing information from it or contributing to it, the restriction is imposed by the people themselves due to their own limitations, both physical and otherwise. The division between techies and non-techies is somewhat odd, because at least for some people, it will only help to widen the gap among the web users. However I believe, with the increasing popularity of the web, this gap will lessen and eventually become non-existent in a fewer years to come…

Technical Vs Non-technical writings

Technology is improving everyday, and newer ways of performing tasks are being discovered every moment all around the world. In our times, google is considered to be the ultimate authority about anything. Google is theoretically equally powerful to answer your queries on technical as well as non-technical stuff. But, always technical stuff stands apart both in quantity and quality of results. If you doubt it, type it in google and search. Anything, virtually. You will get hundreds of thousands of results for any query you make to google. But, just how popular non-technical stuff is with google in comparison to technical stuff? I decided to find out through a small experiment. The result was very evident – technical stuff was almost 8 (!) times popular than non-technical stuff. We will look at the why’s of it later, but let us look at some factual figures.

How did I conduct my experiment?

I selected a few areas of work, that are comparitively hotter than others, are fairly unique and doesn't have much overlaps with each other. Now, I used google and searched for a set of most frequently used terms in each of these areas using the following simple query.

terms - (Text inside angle brackets replaced with the actual name). I literally typed it in the google search box for each of the areas I considered. For example, in case of physics, I typed 'terms physics' in the google search box and obtained a list of most frequently used terms in physics.

Then, I used these terms and searched using Google and measured the yield Google search provides. To keep things simpler, I just took a count of the results from each search. Now, I averaged all counts that resulted from terms belonging to a specific subject.

I took maximum care to select the most commonly used terms (limited by my knowledge and how I perceive their usage to be common) while searching. It was not easy doing this, because many times I found that the terms are used often in completely differing contexts – for example, galaxy is a term used in astronomy, but there are so many websites which sport the name ‘galaxy’, as well as there are clubs and resorts by this name…In such cases, I ensured that at least the first page of my search results don’t have something totally absurd…

The results were as expected. The Technology domain excelled in all the 10 search terms and averaged around 2 billion, while all others averaged quarter of a billion (Astronomy and Physics being exceptions, averaged a little below ½ a billion each) Here is the ranked list of the subjects.

1. Technology
2. Astronomy
3. Physics
4. Medicine
5. Biology
6. Chemistry
7. Evolution
8. Geography
9. Genetics

For more details, have a look at the attached excel…

countsearch.xls

Hosted by eSnips

I will follow up with another post to look into the why's of this, in a couple of days...

Daring to be different...

I am neither here, nor there. This is all that I have been thinking for the past few days now. It is about my life as a whole, and my professional career in specific. Though I have worked in many different areas in my professional career (I played many different roles including being a software developer, a tester, a documentation guy, design analyst, database expert, build expert etc – although none of these qualifies me to be an expert in the respective fields - during my 11 year career in software industry) and personal life (not equally, but almost), I was never there… My choice in life to become a jack of all trades, rather than being a master of any one thing was due to many small incidents in life, that taught me lots of things...It was a very conscious decision, and I don’t repent that (well, most of that). Sometimes, I do things that are totally different, far from being conservative, like the writing project which I have took up now for a book. I stretch myself to do things way beyond my own likings and capabilities. I don’t know, why I do that and if that is really the right thing to do. Am I crazy, I reflect on myself lot of times. More so, recently. The problem for me, is that I am not finding satisfaction anywhere recently. I have the feeling that I would’ve done better if I had concentrated somewhere better than others.

I started my life with music – I learnt Indian classical music for more than 12 years. Once upon a time, it was so dear to me, and I never missed going to any competitions or concerts in our town. But, that enthusiasm disappeared into thin air, a few years back. Though, I listen to music and sing occasionally, I am otherwise foreign to music now. I told before that I don’t repent any of my decisions, but this is one I do, the only one. But, I have little choice now.

Although, I won several certificates and awards in music during those 12 years, I hardly did anything noticeable with my music after that. Though, during those times, I couldn’t tolerate much criticism about my own music, now I am highly critical of any music that I don’t like. I hardly am a good software developer (though I like to be and want to believe that I am one!), nor a good software tester. I am not a good people manager, nor a good technical leader. So, what am I? I like to interfere in everything, peek my little nose into everything, be critical about everything others do, and still don’t do anything worth calling so myself!

So, moral of the story is this. Daring to do things and wanting to be different in life is definitely good, but not at the expense of something dear to you. Don’t hasten and give up something that is invaluable to your *personal* life. Personal interests have much more value than your professional ones. Don't give those up for anything; even if you did, follow that up sooner, before you lose it forever. Repenting on what you lost due to some stupid decisions in your life won’t do any good, anyway.

Cool guide to Semiconductor Physics

Guess what? It comes from what seemed the most unlikely and unexpected quarters – Britney Spears. Britney on Physics...wow! Don’t mistake me here, I am not pulling any dirty jokes here; you know, I am not of that type:-) If you don’t believe me, visit http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm.

I am no fan of western music (eastern music and specifically Indian music is my favorite) and Britney Spears is among the last who I would listen to, for a good hour of music. But, while changing the TV channels, I have listened to couple of her songs, most of which are awfully filled with pelvic movements and well, it is a PG. So much for that!

I will now come back to the subject. Maybe many of you already knew, but I was not aware of this the least. Spears is supposedly an expert in semiconductor physics and not only that, she likes to teach that of which she is an expert. I didn’t carry my opinion about her music, while I read through her tutorials on physics. It was not bad, in fact it contained a lot of information which made many things clear to me about the subject. Now, this thing has bettered my impression about Ms.Spears in my mind. It may cause me to listen to her more and who knows, I may even become a fan of her music (if there is something worth calling so in that)…

Now, click on the link ‘About the author’ in the main page…Did you know about all this about Ms.Spears? Indeed great...

Debugging JavaScript

This is an end-to-end technical post, if there are any readers who are not technically savvy, please excuse me. But this one excites me such a lot that I can’t wait till I post this sooner.

As a software tester, I have limited knowledge about software development. But, being an API and automation tester, I work a lot with programming languages. One thing that helps me (in fact, there are two;-); I will write more on them in a future post) carry on with my programming works is the debugger. Debugger as most of us know is one of the most standard features of almost all programming languages that come with an IDE, including C, C++, all .NET languages, Java etc. Debuggers are available even for some scripting languages including Perl, Python, Ruby etc, as separate products. For the past 2 years, I had been testing the APIs exposed by our product with C# & VB6.0 and one of my colleagues test them with JavaScript. JavaScript is one of those scripting languages like the ones I mentioned above, but has one major drawback. It doesn’t have a proper IDE yet and hence no debugger. So, when my dear friend asked me to take this thing over, due to some other priority assignments for him, I was not very short of terrified. I had to learn something new is a short period of time (my friend consoled me saying that learning JavaScript is simple and that it is very similar to many other scripting languages, which I already knew) and also be productive soon. I started searching for tools that will help me debugging, before I learnt much about the language as such…Till yesterday, I was more or less successful. I found that one of my favorite IDEs used with many scripting environments (including Perl) – Komodo – recently released the alpha version of their product that will help JavaScript debugging in Firefox browser. I wasted no time in trying it out, but couldn’t get it to work properly. But, being in Alpha, Komodo 4.0 still holds promises in its final release.

When I searched around in Google, I found that there are couple of other options, but some of them are priced and yet others seemed to be too fragile. I didn’t obviously want to try out the priced options, because unless sure of it, I didn’t want to spend any money on them.

But, then today evening, I discovered something fantastic with the help of one of my colleagues from our development team. And, the most interesting aspect of it is that I had been using it for the past 2 years for other purposes, but unaware of all its use. As a C# programmer for the past 2 years, Visual Studio NET IDE is very familiar to me. What I discovered yesterday was, you could use the .NET IDE as a debugger for JavaScript. But, the use is not straight-forward as in the case with the .NET languages. JavaScript runs typically in a browser client, but debugging is not directly possible in the browser. There are no browsers available yet, with debugging capabilities. But, .NET IDE provides a way to attach the process in which the browser is running. As soon as the process is attached, it opens a read-only version of the JavaScript code and it internally creates maps for the debug symbols and the source code line-by-line. It works with native JavaScript objects, as well as external objects including COM. Try it out. It works great!

PS: avi attached...

On software patents and copyrights.

Recently i read an article on the internet on the subject. It impressed me, and hence I would like to share that with you...

The article was written sometime during 2000 by the members of SSLUG - Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group. But, still it makes a great read. It discusses about the ethical side of the patenting innovations, among which one part really caught my attention and made me think on various aspects of it. It says that the open source community will be worst affected among all, by the increasing trend of patenting software and technology. Since, there is no single consortium that manages the open source community, and largely runs on individual capacities, the community as a whole will be in an extremely difficult situation if it is proven any of the open source software has violated a patent. There is absolutely nobody that can pay up the royalty or the sue charges. And it is equally impossible for somebody to file a lawsuit to ‘reverse’ a patent. The impact of this is a lot more than most of us even imagine – it has the potential to bring, if not entire, but a significant part of the web to a standstill. Read on…

My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets

Are you wondering what the title of this post means? Many people around the world, according to this news, uses this weird looking sentence as a way to remember the order of the planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Though, when I was a kid, I never used it; I never knew about it. I had hard time, as a student of primary standards in my school, in remembering these names, in the same order. But, there is something more weird happening in the world astronomers' circles. Recently, there was held a 2 week conference of astronomers from all over the world to the christening ceremony of a newly found object in the outer space! Apparently, scientists are split in their opinion of calling it by their dear names…If this is not funny, what else is?

Well, not exactly…the actual confusion is whether to call it as a planet or just one other among those numerous things found in the outer space. I can’t understand (and probably never will) the significance of this “bright, rocky object officially known as 2003 UB313” to call it by a name. Who cares, what it is called? There are millions of objects out there, which don’t have a name and imagine the situation if hundred thousand astronomers all over the world, split themselves in naming each one of them…

Fortunately for us, the astronomers are worried only about the planets. One section is ridiculing that if the other insists on ‘calling’ this object as a planet, they will ‘call’ some others too as planets. This way the number of planets can become as much as 53. Otherwise, don’t dare call the newly found thing as a planet, they warn. This sounds like a real petty quarrel of a few hundred thousand responsible adults, who are dubbed as scientists. Even if they succeed in creating these 53 planets, none of them will really lose the fight, but the primary school kids will, who have to remember the names of all those unseen things, to get a couple of marks in their class tests!

Read on this interesting article…

Software Crisis - does one exist?

If you ever attended any conference that discusses about software, especially those on software testing, you would’ve heard often about how more than 70% of software projects undertaken around the world are a failure, how immature our industry is with processes and all those oft-repeated statements. I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard them too often. In fact, all of the testing conferences I’ve attended so far (not too many, though) started with some well-known speaker announcing this over the microphone in his keynote address, which unmistakably leaves everybody around in awe. Suddenly, everybody will wake up and be ‘enlightened’ about the whole thing, as if from today, they are going to work towards a change over in the software world.

I’ve always pooh-poohed whenever I heard such things, not because I know anything better, but I hate such ‘research surveys’ and sympathize those who spread such news and even more with those who truly believe such news. Today, I happened to see this article written up by an apparently well-known personality (though, I’ve read only a few of him), which basically is along the same line as my apprehensions about this subject. It goes on to ‘prove’ that all that is said about software crisis is just crap. Read on…Anyway, I am just happy to see that my views are not entirely untrue and unsupported by all in our industry...

The Standish Report: Does It Really Describe a Software Crisis?

Finishing always last...

Yes, you heard it right. I didn’t make any mistake in writing up my subject line. It is just human nature, to be competitive and while being so, compare with others. While there are plenty of advices from experts, to dump those comparisons and move on, I think 99% of the people still compare either themselves, or their kids or their spouses with others, every moment. I myself do! The reason is, we always want to win, everywhere, every time. No doubt about it.

But, there is one occasion when you want to finish last. Guess what? Imagine you are in your boss’s cabin, trying hard to explain something you just did, the reason you did it, the way you did it and convince him of the value you bring into the organization by doing so. Let’s say, you are thoroughly convinced about its value, yourself (most of the times, you’re). But, your manager is one stupid idiot (again, it mostly is!), who doesn’t listen to your side at all. He always has something or other to argue about and point out only the wrongs about it. He always wants to end a conversation with his directive to his sub-ordinate. Otherwise, he feels beaten. This, I am sure applies to most of us too (not only our bosses), even during a simple conversation at the coffee table with your colleagues. I want to confess, I am no exception till I decided to give a try to something I read about, a few days back.

The other day, when I had a hot argument with my boss, I just kept silent after a few lines from my side. I let the boss do all the talking. I knew that there are only two possibilities here. Either, the boss will get tired of talking all through. Seeing no response from other, he feels like an idiot (which he really isJ) and stops cribbing. The other possibility is that he won’t budge, but keeps on talking. In my case, the latter happened. But, when I came out of the room, I noticed that the usual I-WON-AGAIN-YOU-LOST smile was missing in my boss’s face. You know what, he’s really got beaten this time, because he never expected that I will be submissive. I am sure, the next time around, when I visit him in his cabin, he will keep himself more silent, and receptive to my words…

PS (Only to my boss): This is just a story, don't grab me by my collars for what I wrote...

Loving my kid…

We, in India, are having a long weekend now. 15^th August is the day India got its independence of British rule in the year 1947. It is a national holiday on that day. There is another holiday coming up on Tuesday, 16^th August for a Hindu (a religion in India) festival. The prospect of a long weekend, prompted authorities of most of the organizations around India declare 14^th August too as a holiday, so that their employees get a long weekend to unwind themselves. Not able to withstand the thought of missing spending this holiday with her parents, my wife left for her native the very next day. Along with her, she took our kid too. She will return only next Wednesday.

Good, I thought! My kid is 4 years old, going to a nearby nursery school, but only for 3 hours during the day. Rest of the time, he is at home. He is quite mischievous and doesn’t listen to us most of the times, without putting in his own conditions while doing so. Why, even if want to go to the toilet, he wants us to count from 1 to 10! When he is around, he just loves to run around at home, making noise at the top of his voice. As if that is not enough, sometimes he invites his friends too to our home to cover up for those missing decibels! Too much, most of the times my wife is tired of dealing with him, so am I. Of course, we love him a lot, but at times we feel like giving him two nice beatings. Many times, I had wished that this guy grow up a bit fast, so that I can peacefully carry out my work.

But, when he is gone, things became entirely different. With him gone, the house looked so empty and totally silent. It feels desolate without a kid around to run around, screaming. I felt so lonely, so bored with nothing to spend my time on. I watched a movie, played games online in the internet, surfed through some of my favorite websites. But, after all that, still I had plenty of time left, and I don’t have a clue how to spend it. Without my kid running around, to play with me, I felt a kind of void. I began to think about how it will feel like, when he is grown up. When he is big, he will walk away with his friends, and maybe, just maybe, not even care for his aged parents (that is us, me and my wife). I can’t imagine such a thing happening in my life, anytime, but such stories about parents being abandoned by their ‘grown-up’ kids are nowadays so common. We are being westernized a lot, a real lot…

With all these thoughts, once again, I looked around in the bed. It looked so empty without him on the side. One or two tears came out of my eyes…

Mothers are special!

Human beings, by nature are selfish creatures (does anyone doubt?). Except for a few exceptions, most of us live for ourselves. Many of us (that too half-heartedly) do favours to other fellow beings, but can’t unconditionally live a life for others. It is just impossible for you to find anybody who lived even a day of their lives for somebody else, forget a life time! There are probably just a handful of Mother Teresas or Mahatma Gandhis, who this world has ever produced.

But, things are different with mothers, when it comes to their own children. This tie is special, for it is a different world, quite different from the world that we all live in. I wouldn’t believe, if any woman, even those who live in the streets and struggle to live every day through their meager earnings of hard labor or maybe even begging, to think about anything that would bring harm to her own children. My own mother is exemplary example, as far as I know and experienced. She currently lives with me at my residence in the outskirts of Bangalore, forgoing the calm, peaceful atmosphere of our residence in my native place, Kerala. I know that she would love to be left alone there with nobody disturbing. I can imagine, she is tired after sacrificing so many things for her children (me and my sister) all through the past 3 decades. But, she didn’t complain when we (me and my wife) wanted her service to help us with our kid (who was just a year at that time). Instead, she was the happiest to come and help me, even though it meant that she had to resign her job, which earned her a handsome sum, and also meant a lot more to her. With myself and my wife working, we needed somebody responsible to take care of things in our household. Of course, my father too ably helps her. But, she has more attachment to me. I know that, but she never expresses that love or affection towards me, explicitly. Sadly, growing up in this environment all through my life, I also couldn’t.

I can’t remember a single night she has slept before I reached home in the night from my office. She spends most of her time in the kitchen preparing breakfast, lunch or dinner for all of us at home. Of course, my wife helps her a lot at kitchen, but still I can’t see my mother come out of the kitchen before 7.30 am every morning, once she gets into it 5.30 am in the morning. The story is not different during any other part of the day. She loves to do it for her family, and never complains.

Everyday, when I leave for office, she would be running behind my kid to get him prepared for his school, before the school van arrives. My father helps her too with this, but I can’t remember a single day when she missed this, for she considers it almost like her duty to her son (who is myself), rather than anybody else. Of course, she loves all other members of the family, but none like myself.

I can imagine, how much she would like to hear appreciations about her worksmanship, for all that she does at our home. Till recently, I never did care for such things and I never thanked her in my life for anything, but now I know they are far more important than I once imagined. Genuine and sincere appreciations are motivators in all walks of life and the service that mothers offer their children is no different. Her face lights up when I appreciate something she did for me and I feel so satisfied to see that...

When I think that all her sacrifices are due to her love for me, I don’t get words to express my feelings for her. She is so godly, above all in this world to me. I would love to hug her and say a big thank you…But then, we never have traditionally expressed love to anybody in our family so explicitly, and hence I don’t want to leave my mother in embarrassment. But, someday I want to hug her with all my love and say that I loved her so much…(I know that she never will read this, since he rarely ever worked on computers)

I am pretty sure all mothers of this world are more or less like my own. I bow to them all for showering all their love, for it makes the world so much a lovely place to live in. You are indeed somebody so special, who I can never become…

www.despair.com

One of my colleagues sent me this link recently. I went into wondering what it is, I was in for a surprise. There is so much tasteful design that has gone into this website. The site has an exclusive online store, which sells posters and photographs with specially crafted words that ooze desperation…It seemed really funny to me, in the beginning. But, think a bit. Do they really mean to build desperation into people’s lives? Like any other companies, this one too has to have a goal in mind. Reading through the pages of their site, I understood that it is to free people, who are so much taken into by the teaching of the so-called expert motivators, from the desperate situation of being despaired because they just discovered that what they just heard from the ‘experts’ doesn’t work in their own lives. Why is that? Simply because, words such as motivation, motivator, motivate etc are all mis-leading, they are rather mis-nomers. There is nothing called as motivation, unless it comes from within. Nobody will ever be able to motivate you, unless you yourselves are determined to be there. We will discuss about it more in another post. But, for now, let me return to the discussion.

At least some of you will agree with me that people behind this effort can’t be desperate with their own lives. As for the others, please give it a thought. If they were indeed desperate, they would never have had such a thought as creating this very site. To me, they seem to some of the best innovators, some of the best optimists. These people believe that, with their wit and sarcasm, they can educate all of us, against such impractical ideas as motivating people and much more. Together, they are doing a service to the society and they are true believers of what they do. Hence, they are optimistic, and not pessimistic or desperate.

Looking at it from another angle, it has also been long proven that negatives doesn’t all the time remain negative. Negatives tend to become positive, inherently. It is fundamental to any material object in the world, to come to and remain in equilibrium. For example, a pendulum can’t obviously swing only to the left, but should swing to the right as well and ultimately will come to the centre sometime in its lifecycle. We are all material beings, so it affects us too. In a way, negatives help to highlight the positives. Sometimes, they even bring positives up. After all, it is a magnet, with its positive and negative poles (of equal intensity) that runs a whole big motor and the generator, which produces electricity that runs the whole world. Think about it.

Respecting one's own haves...

There is an old saying in our part of the world (my native is one of the smallest states of India called Kerala, a very beautiful place with pristine atmosphere; I will write about kerala in some post in the future) that if you want to know the true value of something, ask somebody who doesn’t have it. The other day, while I was watching a Malayalam (language the Keralites speak) movie, I felt the true power of this saying. The movie talks about the all that can wrong in one's life, most of which I could relate with. Not only that, but it also beautifully picturizes how the character in the movie gets over all these seemingly unsurpassable hurdles and sorrows of his life. Actually, the movie itself didn’t awe me, but it brought back reminiscences of my own past.

Let us take a specific example. What does a job mean to you? Bread-earner? or just a pastime? Whatever it maybe, I know how it feels like without it...I believe, most of you will agree with what I am saying here or even 'experienced' it sometime in their lives. There was a time in my life, when I felt so devastated without a job of my own. I had passed my engineering course in electronics from one of the prestigious institutes of India, but largely because of my own fault, I didn’t land up in a job for several months since I passed out of the college. Many of friends had already been into their jobs several months now, while I was still attending interviews and hoping to get a call from prospective employers. The feeling of being without a job, can’t be expressed in words; it is dreadful, depressing, a very kind of sunk feeling. I felt it for a moment when I saw this movie, a feeling of utter desperation. But, soon I came back to reality. Now such a situation can no more make me despair, or rather won’t happen with me at all, because I am backed by all experience of mine (but, that is a different story)

But, let’s just imagine, if it happens again, how would somebody face it? Are you bold enough for facing this in your life? Are you preparing yourself enough now, to face those imaginary bad times that may happen sometime in future? Many don’t, some don’t care and some don’t even know about such a possibility. I would urge all such to be much more serious about life - for all that you know, you are wrong, terribly wrong. I am not advising anybody here to work with the fear that something bad may happen in their lives, but learn to respect what you have at present, learn to utilize all that you have to the maximum extent possible, share all that you have at present with others, who don’t have. This may include individuals and society alike. All this will improve your own chances to survival when bad times strike you…

Time tracking using SlimTimer

I recently came across a tiny little program called SlimTimer, which helps maintain a timesheet of all that you and your team performs on day-to-day basis. SlimTimer is created by Richard White, a user interface designer, and hence many of the usual design issues that we normally encounter have been taken good care of. The philosophy of SlimTimer, as the author words it, is to avoid hierarchies in task allocation, reporting structures etc. Create tasks for individual tracking as well as tasks which are shared between your team-mates. It easy-to-use ‘click to time it’ option is impressive. Additionally, you can tag tasks with labels, which the author says will help you filter them based on those. I couldn’t find how to do it, though. SlimTimer is based on AJAX, which is a comparatively newer technology. Web pages can get updated with information faster through AJAX, because the entire web page doesn’t get reloaded, but only relevant parts are.

To work with SlimTimer, you won’t need any download, but just need to signup. The signup is for free. Once you signup, you will get a screen with 5 tabs, each of which supports distinct operations like add new tasks, manage tasks, reporting etc. You can also operate the timer for each task through a separate page, by clicking on the task. Click on it again, to stop the timer. Each time, the total time spend on each task gets added on and is saved to the site’s database. However, in case somebody goofed up with the entries, this can be edited later on.

More impressive is its integration with bubbles. Bubbles brings in certain advantages to using SlimTimer, but the most usable that I felt was its ability to minimize it to the Windows system tray. Now, you won’t need to open your browser to access SlimTimer, but can be accessed from the system tray directly.

I started using it only a few days back, and I am feeling that it is beneficial. Also, the author looks committed about the future developments of this program. This program is free as of now, and he promises that it will remain so for ever…

Welcome to the wonderful world of blogs - Part V/b

Following are some of the negatives I can think of, about blogging.

1. Takes away plenty of time, at least during the initial stages. With reduced free time for yourself and your family, you may start to feel uneasy after sometime. But, as time progresses, you will catch up (I hope so, because even for me, it is too early to experience it now!)

2. Can make you feel depressed, if you are unable to live upto your expections like the above ones. Especially true, if you are not a strong willed person.

3. Causes strain on one's life, if you commit yourself a bit too much into this. So, take it easy and if needed, rework your priorities with the others, you may have in your life.

4. Criticisms, especially bad ones are difficult to live with. Tempers may flare-up, if you tend to take them personal.

5. Possessiveness can cause a real havoc. Understand that it is impossible (or extremely hard) to maintain copy-rights over the internet on anything at all, sometimes not even for commercial goods. So, don't worry if somebody flicks your ideas or words and says it is their own! It is all part of the game. Remember, the very reason for starting this thing up, is to enjoy sharing information with people...So, be proud that somebody is benefitting from your ideas or words.

6. Finally, blogging is not the end of life. Don't get overly obsessed about it. It will drive you crazy! Attend to your priorities first. Attend to your family, your work, your hobbies and more importantly yourself.

There are definitely lot more in both sides (the positives and negatives), but I want to stop here, for otherwise, people may think this guy has gone nuts! I have thought of all these negatives many times over, when I started off with this blog. I felt, the positives far more outweigh the negatives and so I decided to go ahead, anyway...

This is the final part on this subject 'Welcome to the wonderful world of blogs'.