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Yesterday was an offisite at work. We went for a day trip to Pratapgarh fort beyond Mahabaleshwar.

Destination...

Mode...

Vista...

Code quality

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind

Dr. Knuth surmised this and the following snippet of a java code written by a professional programmer demonstrate this. What the programmer wanted was to find if the string value is empty. Look at the way computer is told to determine this:

// check for empty value
static boolean isEmpty(String value) {

Boolean isEmpty = new Boolean(false);
if ((value == null) || (value.length() == 0))
isEmpty = true;

return isEmpty.booleanValue();

}

Do you see, why I like to be in this profession and what I hate about it!
:-)

Truth ...

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

 - W. B Yeats

Baby DJ

Baby Diya Jha :-)

Latest

Last weekend was a short vacation for the family. A complete R&R at Daman. This one is at Jampore beach, Moti Daman

JBoss, JAXB and JDK 1.6

While using JBoss 4.0.2, JAXB 2.1 and JDK 1.6 (a.k.a J2SE 6.0) if you get a linkage error similar to one discussed here then you should put jaxb-api.jar from JAXB RI into the endorsed directory used by Jboss. Putting it under jre/lib/endorsed directory has no affect as JBoss overrides the endorsed directory with its own. Place the jaxb-api.jar into $jboss-home/lib/endorsed directory instead. It should solve the linkage problem.

In US of A

At home

Final Day

Today is my last day at EIPL. I will cease to exist at this office from tomorrow. I am moving to a new start-up which is being setup in Pune and will be functional probably by early next month.

More later...

Moving On ...

I was a pure java/e-App techie until about year and half ago when my present employer made this tempting offer to lead their VoIP/Java initiative at Pune. I joined them leaving behind the comfort and security of a job from $5 billion giant. The new job, however, soon changed due to the changing business plans and they decided to re-engineer everything that existed in Java to C#/.NET. I stayed on. Left Java and picked up strangers like C# and .NET along with SIP, IMS, Soft-switch etc in this VoIP/C# journey. Now, with first generation of the craft already in the market and my team here quite capable of taking it further, I have decided to move on ...

What Next?

So far, I do not have a firm destination. Google was enticing but, it did not work out. SAS is way too far from home and GSL appeared puerile. Right now I am talking to a fledgling company that is yet to establish presence in India... let us see what happens!

5000 kilometers

Yesterday I completed first 5k on my Royal Enfield Bullet on the way to work. This happend after nearly ten months. The journey so far includes miles of pleasurable ride- mostly done between home to work daily, and couple of out-station solo rides (Narayangaon and Kashid)- accompanied by loads of road presence and envious glances on the way.

Other than usual maintenance and tappet adjustments I had to tighten the cam-gears during initial run-in and replace the oil seals on primary drive case to plug the oil leakage. No other major problems (touch wood) so far, just a couple of cable replacements (clutch at ~4000 kms and speedo at ~3000 kms due to monsoon) .

Cheers!

Thank you from Google

Over two months of wait is finally over- they sent me a thank you note today "... hiring committee carefully reviewed your experience and qualifications and determined that there is not a strong match for a position at this time..."

Seven rounds of intense interviewing- three over the wire and four onsite at Bangalore. Most of them, I thought, went very well, but ... at the end I guess it was not good enough!

Life goes on... may be for the better.
I will not have to relocate now.

Helpdesk at Icici Direct

My other half has a trading a/c with the ICICI Direct but it is only me who runs it and knows the portfolio's worth :-). Lately, I have observed a lot of descripancies in the online MF portfolio tracker at their site. It is reporting few fund holdings twice. This inflates our net worth but, it is of no use as I can not sell them. For selling I need to use the unit holdings page and sadly, the data is accurate here.

I reported this matter to ICICIDirect through following email:

Ref: Trading a/c # XXX
Demat a/c # XXX

Hi,

My mutual fund portfolio tracker page ( trading -> portfolio -> mutual funds) is showing wrong data. Some funds are getting reported twice causing wrong portfolio value. Some funds like:

SBI FUNDS MANAGEMENT PVT LTD SBI MAGNUM COMMA FUND - GROWTH OPTION
and
TATA MUTUAL FUND TATA INFRASTRUCTURE FUND - GROWTH

are reported twice on the page each time under different Fund "Category". I have noticed this problem ever since you have implemented new SIP investment options. Looks like your coders have done a shoddy job and QA has failed to notice it.

This is causing a great inconvenience to me by reporting inflated portfolio value. Pls check and correct the bug as early as possible.

Thanks,
xxx

After two days this is the reply I received from their CSA:

Dear Ms. Jha,

We wish you a Happy New Year!

If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:

1. Login to www.icicidirect.com

2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page

3. click on the Mutual Funds link

4. Click on the Scheme name of the Mutual Fund which you wish to delete.

5. Click on the "x" symbol available on the extreme right side to delete that particular transaction.

Sincerely,

XXX

Customer Service Officer

ICICI Bank Limited

Note the signing authority and her designation..."ICICI Bank".

This is my follow-up reply and I am waiting to hear on this :

> If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we
> request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:
>
> 1. Login to www.icicidirect.com
> 2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page

Did you understand the issue I have reported? I think it is a totally irrelevant and dumb reply I got from ICICI Direct. Let me try to explain the problem once again.

Say I have a mutual fund called MF1 and I have 100 units of MF1 in my DEMAT account. The portfolio tracker page reports MF1 twice as:

serial# 1 MF1 - units held =100
serial# 2 MF1 - units held = 100

Since, I am NOT adding any transaction MANUALLY into my mutual fund portfolio tracker, it must be coming through the software that ICICI Direct uses. Right!

Another thing is that I have subscribed for SIP, hence MF1 can have 100s of SIP transactions all accumulated under SL#1 and SL#2. Do you expect me to delete each SIP transactions one-by-one through your portfolio tracker? Can you imagine the time it will take to do that?

Another thing, if I delete MF1 at SL#2 what is the guarantee that SL#1 would not get deleted also and I will loose all my portfolio information!!! I suspect both SL #1 and SL #2 to share the same PK in the back end database if your DB is in third normal form (?)

I appreciate that you may not follow all the issues that I have raised here, hence, please escalate it to your Technical Architect or SQA Lead- I am sure he will understand the problem and please do not waste my time (and yours too) by copy-pasting a "set" response from your
repository of replies!

Please...my time is very precious...

Thanks for taking time to reply.

- xxx

It is getting increasingly difficult to get an accurate response from ICICI Direct for any query... but ... what are my options? I have heard more annoying tales about the competition from my friends. Unfortunately most CSA activities are either out- sourced or are manned by less than adequately trained personnel who are quite incompetent to address such queries :-( and what is alarming is such dorky CSAs are polluting the name of ICICI Bank as well by signing under their banner. I think ICICI management should separate the CSA's of ICICI Bank and ICICI Direct- at least that will help them to preserve some respect in ICICI Bank that I want to have!