Programming for kids

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Hitesh

logo-easter We spent the long Easter weekend, lazing happily indoors since the weather did not permit going out. I wondered if the time could have been spent better, and started researching if my older daughter is old enough to start programming.

Little background

My daughter will soon be six and she can use the computer very well for the usual tasks and I think she is a bit ahead of the curve, but that might just be a father speaking

The big bottleneck, I see, is her poor English skills. English not being our native tongue and she going to a German kindergarten, has limited her knowledge of English to a few words and phrases. Thus reading and writing code is going to be a challenge.

Visual programming

Given the language ‘handicap’, I started looking out for what the best way to visually teach programming, which does not involve much reading and writing. A little research resulted in 3 options, 2 of which are old and I had come across and one that is pretty new. Continue reading →

Piece of action or peace of mind?

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Hitesh

Every once in a while, I have to stop and think about how much consumption driven we have become. Indian’s were, and still are, one of the highest savers in the world. But things are changing rapidly with the young. Saving is not very high on the list of priorities.

Being Green

Everyone talks about being green, buying green. We participate in new fads like the ‘Earth day’. Personally, I think that not buying at all is even better. Do you really need to buy a new mobile phone each year? What about the music player, the laptop, the car?

Whether I look at children or young employed adults, I see a clear trend. Everyone wants the biggest; latest; best, gadgets; phones; bikes etc. This is one American cultural influence I am not very comfortable with. Americans are known for their massive debt powered consumption. But imagine, with India’s population and her growing appetite what could happen to this planet?

Continue reading →

Hausmeister service for India

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Hitesh

Hausmeister Service Tauer in der Allinger Strasse, 2006 by gumtau. Thanks to the company I keep, online and offline, the only entrepreneurial ventures I see are tech related. Everyone wants to be the next viral sensation and make pots of money. Hardly anyone wants to add real value to the life of others and improve the community as a whole.

Rant aside, I recently came across a very interesting piece from Vivek Wadhwa titled Replicators, Innovators, and Bill Gates. The form of ventures I described above might be of innovative type, but there is no harm in starting a replicating venture. Especially if it brings in a steady stream of income and gives stable employment to a few people.

One such service I see in Germany which can be easily replicated in India is the ‘Hausmeister’, literally a house master service. For a fixed fee from each resident, a company takes care of all the common issues with a housing apartment. Whether it is cleaning, sanitation, repairs and other forms of maintenance.

With the several million apartment complexes in India, this service could organise and streamline the ‘building maintenance’ nightmare and make decent money, while generating employment for several people of varied skills. People who desperately need a job that they can do with dignity.

The occupants also gain as they have one throat to choke and do not need to deal individually with a number of service providers. The last such venture I saw, was the greatly successful cable wallah. No reason similarly spirited individuals can’t make this service a success too.

Windows 7 shortcuts

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Hitesh

One thing that is clear from the feedback on my previous article on hidden Windows 7 features: we love our keyboard shortcuts. So here are a few more selected shortcuts.

Press this key	To do this
Desktop Shortcuts
	Open or close the Start menu.
+ R	Open the Run dialog box.
+ D	Display the desktop.
+ Spacebar	Preview the desktop.
+ P	Choose a presentation display mode.
Window Management
+ M	Minimize all windows.
+ Shift + M	Restore minimized windows to the desktop.
+ Up Arrow	Maximize the window.
+ Left Arrow	Maximize the window to the left side of the screen.
+ Right Arrow	Maximize the window to the right side of the screen.
+ Down Arrow	Minimize the window.
+ Home	Minimize all but the active window.
+ Shift + Up Arrow	Stretch the window to the top and bottom of the screen.
+ Shift + Left Arrow or Right Arrow	Move a window from one monitor to another.
Task Switching
+ T	Cycle through programs on the taskbar.
+ Tab	Cycle through programs on the taskbar by using Aero Flip 3-D.
Ctrl + + Tab	Use the arrow keys to cycle through programs on the taskbar by using Aero Flip 3-D.
Ctrl + + B	Switch to the program that displayed a message in the notification area.
+ G	Cycle through gadgets.
Taskbar Shortcuts
+ number	Start the program pinned to the taskbar in the position indicated by the number. If the program is already running, switch to that program.
Ctrl + + number	Switch to the last active window of the program pinned to the taskbar in the position indicated by the number.
Alt + + number	Open the Jump List for the program pinned to the taskbar in the position indicated by the number.
Windows Explorer Shortcuts
+ Pause	Display the System Properties dialog box.
+ E	Open Computer.
+ F	Search for a file or folder.
+ L	Lock your computer or switch users.

If you are interested in drinking from the fire hose, here is the definitive list of shortcuts.

Adding context to your logs

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Hitesh

joysaphine @ flickr

If you have ever worked on a multi-threaded application or even any application of significant scope, one of the unwritten requirement is a log file that helps in supporting the application.

The challenge is to be able to piece together all the scattered log entries that belong together, may be as a single transaction, or a user’s session. So the goal is to have a unique identifier in each log entry that will aid greping. If you have ever faced this, you either did it cleanly as I will detail below, or you had to hack in a ‘context’ to each log entry by appending / prefixing some unique id.

I will talk about the two most commonly used logging frameworks are Apache’s log4j and log4net.

The bad (obvious) way:

logger.info(uid + " I am doing something important");
logger.debug(uid + " I am doing something else");

The problems with this approach are

might not have access to the uid in each function that is called
need to remember to append the uid everywhere
no way to do it in common code, utility libraries, etc.

The good news is, support for such a use case is baked into log4j and log4net.
Continue reading →

Windows 7, hidden features

Posted on February 21, 2010 by Hitesh

It’s been over 6 months, and Windows 7 still surprises me, pleasantly. The last time I felt the same about Windows was in 1995. Let me share a few things I found, which are generally not discussed.

Note: I never used Vista, so if some of these were present in Vista, I wouldn’t know.

The Windows Explorer

I think the explorer has seen the most refinement, there are nice things in all corners. My favourite features:

Pin to Windows Explorer

You might have heard about ‘pin to task bar’, but did you know that you can pin to windows explorer, which adds a folder to the Windows Explorer task bar shortcuts jump list. Wow, those were too many words but still doesn’t explain it right, so here’s a picture instead.

Drag a folder to the task bar

And the folder shows up in the jump list

(right click on the icon)

Hitesh Sarda

Thoughts on life, technology, education and entrepreneurship