Sunday, August 16, 2009

kaminey - fast and racy flick

this one is a sure hit.. the movie is fast does not give you time to think.. there are always multiple things running parallely, enough to keep your mind occupied. the acting by both shahid and priyanka is great.. i even liked priyanka's bro acting.
def worth a watch and i think deserves 4/5 rating by most of the critics.

Friday, August 14, 2009

loosing independence on independence day

it is ironic that we today feel scared to go out on our independence day.. be it because of terrorist attack, traffic rush or the latest swine flu

Thursday, August 13, 2009

support as a career

I remember the time when i came to oracle for my job interview. Though I had a offer on hand from another company (via campus placement at bits pilani), but I had not received my joining date yet making me quite nervous. I went through multiple rounds in oracle and in the later rounds i was multiple times asked this "are you okay with support profile". i kept saying 'yes' and got the job offer. that was six years back.
In any college when reading about computers or related technology, anything that we do as practicals is generally writing a program and running it. The program could be relatively simple to complex. But this mapping of IT = programming (aka development) is so ingrained in us then that we don't realize the other roles in the software development lifecycle and are always bent on taking development as a career path.
The first thing that comes to mind when you think of 'support' is call center. You have this image of sitting at a desk with a sheet of paper having the usual set of questions and answers that could be asked by a customer calling you. But tech support is not that, it is much more.
Being in tech support i have realized the complexity in dealing with large IT env where solutions from multiple vendors, technologies, hardware etc must coexist and work with one another. A support engineer needs to understand the environment in its entirety and figure out where the problem lies. The actual problem fix may be done by a developer, but finding the problem area is in many cases is more complex than the fix.
There are 2 ways in which you can increase your knowledge, horizontally and vertically. By horizontally growing you need to be aware of multiple solutions available in various layers of software and hardware stack and have a basic understanding of what works best where. This is generally mapped to a role of a consultant. By vertical growing you know more and more about some specific application. The person grows as 'tech guru' in that space.
So my advise to anyone who is facing the dilema of similar kind is to go ahead give it a shot and you may just like it. There is enough challenging work that can be done in support, testing, QA etc. Don't ignore these roles even if you are from a good college.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

understanding libumem

Found a very interesting blog about understanding libumem. Will defintely give it a shot soon.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Love aajkal - watchable

watched "love aaj kal" this weekend. some parts of the movie is truly enjoyable reflecting the confusion our generation faces over practicality and love :)
but i thought there was too much saif in it.. and some other characters could have been given more screen time. the songs are nice and cinematography is awesome.
timesofindia rating of 4 seems too much.. i would give it 3 or 3.5

False impression - Totally thanda

completed reading "The false impression" yesterday. Very dissapointing book actually.. nothing much happens in terms of story and all this sounds very unreal.
I am a fan of jefrey archer books but this one is one of most boring books by the author i have read.