New home to Blog content…

Thank you very much for all the readers to visit my blog and providing great comments. In the past few years, you made me to improve the posting style and the content. Starting from 2006, i learned especially the editing part of the blogs and this process enabled me to improve my thinking skills.

Starting from April 1st 2010, I have moved all the content of this blog to my personal website’s blog.

All the content, comments and images are successfully moved and all the new blogs will be posted under my website. This decision was taken to consolidate all my blogs (https://sureshkrishna.wordpress.com, http://tictactoeworld.wordpress.com and http://parenting4you.wordpress.com).

Thank you very much for your patronage and i hope you will enjoy my posts on my new website. http://sureshkrishna.com/blog

Boss 4 : What if your Boss cant make a Decision ?

I see that many Leadership development and MBA programs talk about the “Leadership Skills” and “How to be a Good Manager”… and others. Interestingly, no one is interested in “How you should not be as a bad leader/boss/manager”.  This is my attempt to write on my own experiences and those of my friends and colleagues. Decision Making seems to be one of the inherent quality of a Boss (this Boss could be a leader or manager). Never the less people are often surprised and confused thinking why their Boss can’t make a “Decision”. You would think that it is the time to make THE Decision irrespective of a GOOD or BAD decision. A Decision is needed for many people in Personal and Professional life because of some obvious reasons…

• A Decision gives you the Direction of Action. Without which one would be wandering in space without knowing what should be done.
• A Decision helps you to Focus. If not, one is doing some part of many things and may feel that there is no sense of fulfilment.
• A Decision helps you to Eliminate other Options and Pick One. One can reach destination only by choosing a Single Path and not by choosing more than one Path.
• A Decision removes the Feeling of Unknown (and confusion).
• In the end, a Bad Decision can be reworked but you can not do anything about No Decision.

There could be many bad decisions taken by bosses but at least that gives a sense of direction to the team that works for him. And now, there will be so many instances that you think your boss is not able to take a decision and you are paying a heavy price for that. You are driven in to more and more uncertainty and confusion when your Boss postpones or procrastinate a decision. Following are some of the issues that may and could cause your Boss’s inability to take a decision.

Obligation

At times your Boss is given that position not because he is worth that position but there is no one to fill that position. So, this Boss always feels obligated to his Boss (Super-Boss). He can not even approve a purchase order worth $25 as he is not sure if his Boss will approve the same. In this case your Boss knows that he is not worth that position and so does the Super Boss. The Boss is very paranoid about each and everything that you do. He may even think that you are his competitor.

If you get 1 million dollars in Lottery. You may not feel bad to pay 40% tax to state. It’s Free money any way.

Super Boss’s Pet

This Boss is given the position because Super Boss thinks he needs some one “Who knows him” and “Does not question him” in whatever he does. In this case even if your Boss knows what is the “Right” decision, he will not make it unless it comes from Super Boss.

You lick mine and i lick yours.

Contentment

Some Bosses feel that they achieved a great thing in life by becoming “Boss”. Once people become content, their urge to do “Good” work and “move ahead in the ladder” dies. This is not to forget that the manager may be definitely capable and intellectual…its just that at this point of life he feels content and they don’t have the drive.

Contentment curtails growth.

Fear of Failure

Some don’t want to make a decision unless it comes from his Boss. These people like to take the credit if some thing is a Success else they feel nice to pass the Failure back to the Boss. They want to say that, “I did this because you asked me to do”. Where as they themselves would want to postpone the point of decision as long as possible.

Biggest failure is not to make a decision and not to fail.

Of course, you may have seen many more reasons or subsets of above. This kind of Boss seems to be very painful as working with him will not give you any sort of contentment or growth. Sometimes the only way to get out of the situation is to come out of the team or company. Though, i have seen very few who took the charge and jumped the hierarchy to become his boss’s peer.

A Boss is a Boss. If you can’t change him, learn to handle him.

You may be interested in …

• Boss 3 : Bad BOSS can make you quit!
• Boss 2 : Does your Boss see you as his competitor ?
• Boss 1 : What not to do as a Boss !

Boss 3 : Bad BOSS can make you quit!

I resisted to write such an article for a long time (almost 3 years). I thought it is best written now. In the previous article about “How to be a good BOSS” few desirable characteristics are mentioned. What is not mentioned in that article is “How to be a BAD BOSS”. While i do want to write about the BAD BOSS, for this article i want to restrict the scope to few experiences that made one of my friend to quit his organization.

My friend (i call him “GoodFriend” in this article) joined this corporate in Mid of 2008 in Bay Area. He is a great quality assurance engineer with eight years of experience in Financial and Medical domains. GoodFriend joined this organization as this corporate “seems” to have good work culture. The hiring manager is same as his BOSS in the work too. So, at least the expectations of the candidate and the skill sets are known to the BOSS.

This BOSS seems to have a very bad mouth when it comes to employees and he had 4 tem-members for him self including my GoodFriend. The BOSS is an authoritative machine and wants to know each and everything that team-members do. Following are some of the questions that BOSS asks all the team members…

• You look so relaxed, don’t you have work ?
• BOSS sees the GoodFriend in cafeteria and starts asking about the work, results and deadlines.
• If the GoodFriend turns up to office later than 9.00am, he asks “Why were you late and why did you not call me”.
• If the GoodFriend needs a leave (even if it for 1 or 2 days), he needs to approach the BOSS at least 2 weeks earlier. Else, the BOSS is very angry and rebuke in front of the team.
• It’s been almost 2 years this GoodFriend has joined but till now he could work from home only 17 days. He is afraid that the BOSS would ask the details of each and every hour at home.

While the above are only some of the other non-technical stuff. Following are the sarcastic and insulting comments that this BOSS does. Some times GoodFriend feels that the BOSS nay be feeling that he is in a race with him (Boss).

• How many tests did you execute today and how much time each of them took ? And what did you do during the execution time.
• “Hay… GoodFriend, just listen to me. Don’t use your brain.”
• During the meetings, if the GoodFriend suggests some process or technical aspects, the BOSS would say, “Just follow what i say”.
• You are a good Quality Engineer but you should also learn Java and C# coding. You should be flexible. When the GoodFriend says that he has no interest in programming. He is labelled as “Rigid” , “non-cooperative” and “Non-obedient” employee.

Once the GoodFriend has gone thorough all this humiliation and workplace sarcasm, he finally decided to QUIT the job and joined another small company that he worked previously. He could not take this any more and everyone else in his department seems to believe the BOSS than him. Anyway, he joined his previous company and feels GREAT about the move. He says, he feels so relieved, relaxed and works with high enthusiasm.

Lessons Learnt :

The BOSS is the window to any Organization. If that window is bad, your doors to the Organization are almost shut.

You can not give your best, if you are not satisfied with Work and Morale at work place.

Your BOSS’s attitude can ruin your years of expertise and may make you feel devastated.

A close look at Google Privacy Policy!

For many Google seems to be a very cool Internet company and Google has become synonymous to Internet. For the people who are not in technology/computer industry, it seems to be too hard to believe that Google is more than just an e-mail service and Search Engine.

I compiled few important legal privacy notices from Google Website and you can imagine how your data, emails, chats, mobile apps and Buzz can be used.
“Google may know you more than your parents, wife and kids”

Google Buzz

Website : http://www.google.com/buzz/help/privacy.html

When you first enter Google Buzz, to make the startup experience easier, we may automatically select people for you to follow based on the people you email and chat with most. Similarly, we may also suggest to others that they automatically follow you. You can review and edit the list of people you follow and block people from following you.

When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts you like or comment on and the other users with whom you communicate, in order to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services.

If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google. If you use a mobile device to create a post which shares your location, then your location will be collected by Google and displayed to other users, as described when you first attempt to use Buzz on a mobile device. You may thereafter opt out of the collection and display of your location on a per-post basis. You can also choose to exclude your location from all of your posts.

If you chose to delete your Google profile, your Buzz posts will be deleted, but the comments and “likes” you have made on other people’s posts will not be deleted. You have the option to remove your comments on others’ posts individually if you’d like. Residual copies of deleted material may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

Google Chat

Website : http://www.google.com/talk/privacy.html

Account activity. You need a Google Account to access Google Talk. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration. When you use Google Talk, we may record information about your usage, such as when you use Google Talk, the size of your contact list and the contacts you communicate with, and the frequency and size of data transfers. Information displayed or clicked on in the Google Talk interface (including UI elements, settings, and other information) is also recorded.

We use this information internally to deliver the best possible service to you, such as improving the Google Talk user interface and maintaining a consistent and reliable user experience.

You can uninstall the Google Talk software at any time through your computer operating system’s uninstall process. You may delete your contacts information or chat histories you have stored in your Gmail account by deleting them through Gmail or by deleting your Gmail account from the Google Accounts page. Because of the way we maintain this service, such deletion may not be immediate, and residual copies may remain on backup media.

Google Mail

Website : http://mail.google.com/mail/help/privacy.html

Gmail stores, processes and maintains your messages, contact lists and other data related to your account in order to provide the service to you.

When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.

Google’s computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering advertisements and related links, preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail.

Design Patterns at a glance!

There is this short test on the web floating around. I captured the screen for everyones reference. I felt this is a simple, precise explanation of patterns. Enjoy.

Commercial and OpenSource OCR Softwares

After testing the FineReader, OmniPage, ReadIRIS, and SimpleOCR, Aspire, Tesseract….it is evident that ABBYY FineReader 9 is the best overall value, while ReadIRIS is the best OCR software for under $150.

The main features that differentiate OCR software are:

• Character recognition accuracy
• Page layout reconstruction accuracy
• Support for languages
• Support for searchable PDF output
• Speed
• User interface
• API / SDK
• Support / Consulting
• Stability of the engine when processing large documents

Following are some of the Softwares that i played with and compared.

SimpleOCR

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.  SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications. If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it.  The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way.  Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users. Our own freeware OCR application provides acceptable accuracy for those who just need to convert a few pages and can’t justify the cost of commercial OCR software.  Developers can use the command-line and SDK versions to integrate SimpleOCR with their custom applications.

 

ABBYY FineReader

FineReader Professional is a highly accurate and easy to use OCR software that includes host of features including digital camera OCR, intelligent document layouts, image enhancement, barcode recognition and command line integration.  FineReader 9 is our pick for OCR software because its document layout retention will save you much time in reformatting documents you convert for editing

IRIS ReadIRIS

Affordable OCR software for business and home users.  ReadIRIS Pro provides a extremely accurate OCR recognition rate at a low cost, but still has some of the advanced features that higher priced professional OCR software includes.

Nuance OmniPage

OmniPage is widely considered the fastest, most accurate and fully featured OCR software.  OmniPage 17 Professional has a unique new feature that lets you convert any type of document to searchable PDF or Word. OmniPage does not have a downloadable demo. Nuance also does not provide free technical support after the first call.  For these reasons we recommend the ABBYY and IRIS products instead.

OmniPage is an Optical character recognition application available from Nuance Communications. Nuance Communications was acquired by ScanSoft, which also took over its name in October 2005.OmniPage converts images such as scanned paper documents, and PDF files, into file formats used by computer applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, or HTML files.OmniPage is in competition with ExperVision (TypeReader), Readiris and ABBYY Fine Reader as well as free software such as GOCR and Tesseract.

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr
In computer software, Tesseract is a free optical character recognition engine. It was originally developed as proprietary software at Hewlett-Packard between 1985 until 1995. After ten years without any development taking place, Hewlett Packard and UNLV released it as open source in 2005. Tesseract is currently developed by Google and released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

http://jmagick.wiki.sourceforge.net
JMagick is an open source Java interface of ImageMagick. It is implemented in the form of Java Native Interface (JNI) into the ImageMagick API. JMagick does not attempt to make the ImageMagick API object-oriented. It is merely a thin interface layer into the ImageMagick API. JMagick currently only implements a subset of ImageMagick APIs. Should you require unimplemented features in JMagick, please join the mailing list and make a request. JMagick has a LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License) license.

http://www.expervision.com
The award-winning TypeReader converts scanned documents into electronic files at speed of 8,000 pages per hour with maximum reliability. Desktop 7.0 offers added flexibility to handle color and grayscale images, with duplex scanning support to process documents in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian and Polynesian. It employs an unparalleled recognition technology to support 2618 fonts. Users can choose to output to various formats including PDF, MS Word, Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, HTML, etc.

http://www.edocfile.com
Tiff to Text is designed to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in a batch process. The program utilizes the OCR engine from Nuance (Owners of OMNI Page – formally ScanSoft) that is included with Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI).

http://www.simpleocr.com/OCR_Software_Guide.asp

Boss 1 : What not to do as a Boss !

Some of my random observations and rants about BAD managers and bosses…

Motivation : Manager thinks that every employee has the motivation and he need not do anything. This is a typical problem i see in the managers who grow up the ladder from the technical streams. These manager’s seldom believe that employees need to be motivated to do their best and not all “jobs” are interesting.

Don’t assume that  employees have Motivation because you are paying for their work.

Right Job : At the time of recruiting, you have a set of job responsibilities and tasks that you want an employee to fulfill. Things change in time and so are  the responsibilities. As a manager, it’s your JOB to assign the right Task/Job to your employee. Are you wondering why your team-mate is not able to succeed or he is not performing to his level you imagined ?

Choose and Assign the right job for your team. If you ask them to do an ODD job, then apologize to them and explain the situation.

Information Sharing : Information spreads fast. Very Fast! If something is happening with your team, project or customer. Inform the team with the right information AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – ASAP. Holding back the information or maintaining the secrecy has a negative impact on the employees. They loose trust on you. Be informed that your employees always have contacts to get the information.

Understand that Information Sharing is CRITICAL. Never share an information that is stale and known to everyone except you.

All-In-One Responsibility : Some managers have the concept of “All-In-One/ Open Responsibilities”. This means, everyone in the team should be able to do everything. You know what, this is the Disaster Recipe. When we call set of individuals as team, we are talking about individuals who are specialized in an area and able to collate different strengths for a common goal. The side effects of this theory is that the individual employees are completely demoralized as they don’t work on any specialized task anymore. They are not experts in any area as they switch the context of the tasks very frequently. e.g. today they work on Java issue, tomorrow they work on Perl problem and day after they work on Install Shield. The important side-effect that i see is that none of the tasks will be “Complete” or “Perfect” or “Designed to Last”, because no one owns it.

Assign the Ownership of tasks and define the Responsibilities to Individuals.

Appreciation of Efforts : Individuals like to hear their appreciation in group and criticism in private. Unfortunately, some managers do other way round and this really sucks. Even if you slog for months and months, this manager does not appreciate you and he does not even look at you. He probably has an attitude of “You are working and I am working. You are getting pain and i am getting paid”.

If you need a stable team, be a God Father to your team in every respect.

I will keep on adding more and more to this list with my experience. I strongly feel that everyone knows what to do but very few know “What NOT to do” 😉

Did you experience similar things at your work place ? Do you have more points to add to this list ? Please do share your experiences…

Eclipse Guest (Web) Lecture at Rajagiri College @ India

One of my close friend is a professor in Rajagiri Engineering College for Computer Science and got me introduced to the head of the Department. This engineering college conducts guest lectures from variety of technology verticals and they requested me to have a Eclipse lecture session. After a lot of initial planning we finally started a 5 hour series of lectures on Eclipse (Eclipse course).Eclipse Guest Lecture Series

In the first session i Introduced the basic idea of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and it’s win over the conventional text editors. We then moved on with different text editors like Notepad, Textpad, EditPlus, vi and then talked about the Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, JDeveloper as an introduction. Typically in the Engineering colleges there will be budget constraints and they seldom has access to expensive IDEs. The faculty and students are very excited to know about the IDEs and the role it plays in their day-to-day development life.

Here are some pictures…

Can you do effective Context Switching ?

Everyone in Software and IT industry are exposed to the what i call as “Context Switching” problem. Bosses are so adept in giving different kinds of tasks to the “makers”, they often dont realize whats involved in the context switching. Before i move on, i was reading a very interesting article from Paul Graham on the “Maker’s Schedule; Manager’s Schedule“. Indeed, he was right on to the point of where the programmers (aks Makers) and managers spend their time and what does “meetings” mean to each of them.

We very well assume that most of the programmer’s have 8 hours of work time in a day and schedule all the work according to it. What we very often forget to take in to account are the obvious and non-obvious tasks. As Paul says, programmers one piece of work/task is normally in the 1 day chunk  (for some at least, it’s in 1/2 day chunks) and any disturbance in that 4-8 hours of time proves to be very costly. We all want to concentrate and make sure that the entire program is in our head till the time we are done with it. This phenomenon is very well explained by Paul in his article “Holding a program in one’s head“.

When you start your brand new day at office thinking over a problem or a algorithm, your boss calls up and asks you for a status update because his boss asked for a team update. Well, that is the request you need to honor without a question.  Usually the calls will not be 5-10 minutes but goes for minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour, because we are trying to solve a problem over the phone or in the meeting room.

• Meetings,
• Weekend vacation talk,
• Extended Lunch and coffee time,
• Status reports to manager,
• Status report to customer,
• Helping the Sales and Marketing Team,
• Attending the personal calls
• etc… (i am sure there are 100s of such things)

The tasks, your manager thinks of as 10 minutes actually takes 1hour and after sending the sweet report or tools comparison to him, you again head down to start writing your program and after 1hour you get a call to say that the report format should be changed so that he can submit it right away to his boss. Phewww…. you did that one too. Now the time is almost, 2.00pm and you really want to concentrate and do the REAL work. All in all, When i analyze the average programmer probably gets around 5 hours of quality time out of 8 hours in the day time. No wonder, we often end up working late nights just before the delivery. Many programmers has the similar habit of working in the dark/late hours. Yes, that works perfectly. No one to call you or ask for reports or for help. The only thing that you really think of is the problem before you.

I work on a project which has a very tight dependency with the environment(installed software on the machine) . Every thing installed on a machine matters and a lot of legacy code is maintained from past 15 years or so. The environment is so critical that if one installed the required software in anyway other than the prescribed order, you may need to burn the mid-night lamp to find some non-obvious, strange and scary system behavior. Of course, initially i was under the impression that the software system MUST not depend on the environment, but as i got into the system, i believe that some times the dependency just exists (due to several legacy apps and unimagined integrations of different products).

Context Switching is one project impedement that Agile Methododlogy and Scrum claims to remove. Scrum recommends the values where the team has a specified time for meetings and tries to decrease the buerocracy in th project against the traditional adhoc meetings  and untimely calls for context switching. Of course one can say they are following Scrum and still do the traditional way, but i have seen this working in my experience.

Did any of you have such problems of Contect Switching ? What do you do to come over it ?

Google Chrome OS : The Next Wave

I was happy to see the news that Google announced the Chrome based OS. Soon after a week of my recent blog on Google and the way it transformed every ones life, i was pretty excited to see this announcement. I am particularly happy that Google is entering into the Operating System market and i believe that they will do justification to what they claim.

For many the announcement has been generating mixed feelings. Many technology enthusiasts (and pro-googlers) feel that this is a great step ahead and some are skeptic about the success of this project.

Simplicity : Google has been leading in the simple, usable and intuitive UI. I hope it continues to do so with the Chrome OS. When i see a simple Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing, that the major difference i see (that Bing has a distraction and Google not).

Open Source : Apache and Eclipse have redefined the view of an open-source software. The common concept of “Collaborate on Platform and Compete on Products” is a great idea. Google Chrome’s source code becoming open source, will open up all the channels to improve, contribute and extend the OS.

Competition to Microsoft ? : I don’t think so.  Google has been redefining the way people think of Internet and World Wide Web. Microsoft is the PC Operating System and Corporate IT infrastructure giant. There are lot of articles and blogs about the Google and Microsoft comparison on the Chrome OS and that’s all absurd for me. Comparing Chrome OS and Windows is like comparing apples and apricots. Does it makes sense. ??? Google is the company (in my opinion) trying to make web as a platform and building all it’s applications on web. So, i would see the Chrome OS only as an alternative for the heavy weight Internet users.

Would it be the next Linux ? : (No offense to Linux lovers please) During 1998-2000 time frame i was very excited to know about Linux as an alternative to the existing operating systems. When one compares the time to install a Windows box and Linux box with the same capabilities for a home user, Linux lacked the ease of installation and application support. As a technologist, i took hours to install the Linux and at the end i would abandon it as i don’t find the applications that i want or incompatible drivers. I still remember that installing the CD drivers is a big deal and took hours to find a compatible one. I guess, the story changed a little after the arrival of Redhat, Fedora and Ubuntu distributions. It is still a nightmare for the advanced home users to install and configure a Linux distribution. I really really hope that Chrome OS designers would take care of this issue.

More space on Internet : If Google wants to make the web as the platform, then it may need to increase the email, docs and picture sharing space on the web. Why? It is for the natural reason that if you want to use the web for everything, i don’t want to be restricted by the space in my account. Compared to the 120 to 250 GB of hard disk now-a-days, we are only talking about few gigs of memory on line.

Security and Personalization : As such Google is having problem to fight against the privacy laws regarding the google mail and advertisements. Would it become more controversial with the Chrome OS. If web is the platform and i would use Chrome OS, would my documents be secure ? Would Chrome install/suggest applications/plugins depending on the email, documents or photo content. These are some of the questions that Google for sure has to think about.

ChromeWave : Yes, i think and imagine that the architecture of Chrome OS has the Wave built in. That would be such an awesome thing for the home users and corporates. I could talk, video conference, share documents and pictures with my parents and friends in India seamlessly from the Chrome OS with the Wave capabilities. Corporates can make sure of  the ChromeWave to video conferencing, decision making, pair-programming (?), real time collaboration and others. (Note: ChromeWave is my own creation to combine the Chrome and Wave’s capabilities)

So… It is too early to conclude anything about the success or failure of the Chrome OS. Perhaps once the source code is released and the Architecture is known,  only can one have valid comments. One thing for sure is that Google is gearing up to take on other areas of the computer and Internet industry. Its the time for everyone to be alert and more innovative in terms of the technology, usability and the perceived benefit they give to the corporate and home user.

Some Interesting Reading…

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
• http://mashable.com/2009/07/07/google-chrome-operating-system
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/meet-chrome-googles-windows-killer
• http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/google.chrome.os/index.html
• http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/five-things-googles-chrome-os-will-do-for-your-netbook