the other significant piece of writing i did today

Hi all,

Many of you (this actually depended on quite a few factors), would have received an email early this week, asking you to send me your email ids, so that we could furnish you with an account at our new AWS BLOG. Well, after much thought and work, we have finally managed to give all of you accounts at this AWS Blog.

To find out what the blog is, open up your web browsers and redirect it to: http://157.227.18.220/public_html/
You will have to add 157.227.18.220 to the list of sites that do not need a proxy.

To do this you will have to open Internet Explorer then choose tools->internet options->lan settings->advanced and type in 157.227.18.220 into the textbox next to the "do not use proxy server for..." label.

You can then save this in your bookmark as AWS Blog, so that you can visit it, without having to remember an odd ip.

So what is this blog anyway?

A blog is a site that contains news from different sources. It may be news from your personal life, or something terrifically technical. The important point is that you are free (within certain limits of course) to write up on any topic that catches your interest.

Our purpose?

We want this to be a forum for discussing anything that you want to, with everyone else in AWS, the twelfth floor or can access that ip. If you have a tough sql query that just doesn't seem to work, post it on our blog and let's see if somebody comes up with an answer. If you are going onsite and want to find out which is the best restaurant for original Rajasthani food, that you'd like to take your friends to, post it and maybe somebody would come up with a possible candidate. Or, if you have just discovered something nice which you would like everyone else to know, post it, and you reach out to all those who are accessing the site. We want it to be a discussion forum for everyone. An online one, since getting everybody into the same room is quite a tight fit.

How do I use it?

Just get to our website and check out all the stories posted there.

If you want to contribute a story, please login.

By default your login is that part of your tcs.com email id without the @tcs.com. So if your email id is ramesh.ananthakrishnan@tcs.com then your username would be: ramesh.ananthakrishnan

Your default password is password
You can then change it to anything you wish.

Click on the link which says either "contribute" or "get published"
You will now be taken to a page. The important fields are Title, Topic and Body Text. Type in some relevant title, and choose a relevant Topic. Right now we have the following topics:
1. Ask Aws Blog
2. General News
3. Linux
4. Programming
5. Windoze
6. Wireless

Choose a relevant topic. If more than one topic seems relevant, choose the best one. Type out your entire story in the Body Text box, and then type in submit.
Your story will right now be posted on the website for one and all to see (after authorization from the moderator).

And then, what?...

Well all services depend on their users. We now have an online forum for discussion. Let's make the best use of it.

Cheers and may you blog well.

I had actually wanted to make it very very vitriolic but then ythee stayed my hand

gwaha...

may move to a new skin over the weekend.

posting the mail i wrote to rajeev

the news after you mysteriously dissapeared one friday
night, and appeared only today as a mail header
reading quite quaintly "Kozhikkattuthody, Rajeev",
here's the news....

Tidel is as it has always been. the twelfth floor is
still full of cadavers pushing their time and becoming
alternate cobol programmers arisen from the dead.

The only semblance of life was yesterday when they all
twitched some limbs in the Anti-chess competition. It
was a roaring success for some vague definition of
success like dog poo. Well, actually it was quite a
hit, except for the fact that binoy pilfered most of
the chocolates and ran off with them. Yes, we were
treated to the spectacle of Binoy trying to lower the
record for the 100m dash for overweight men over 75
and suffering from twinges of gout.

work: I'm in testing, so work consists of reviewing
350 test cases and asking inane, asinine questions to
prove that yes! I am actually reading that thing and
not dying of boredom from having to click all the
buttons (even the ones left over by mistake) on any
random god-given gui.

Place & attitude: Do cab drivers there swear at you or
do they say "hi". Bwahahaha... Here's it's the same
old story. ouch!!!!

Weather: the swimsuit I had left out yesterday got
fried in the sun. This is summertime on Icarus.

Body odour: good as always. Yep! Smelling good.
Smellin good.

Clothing: half slacks and loafers along with bathroom
slippers.They have to pay me extra if i have to dress
up in a suit.

side note: did our badri make a pass at you? ;-)

good news: radha has come to the US. The sounds of
silence that surround me in a soothing sea of serenity
cannot be explained.

anything else to add: no! do try and mail me a use
Perl t-shirt. Will pay you.

and since this is your mail id expect to get
spammemed.....

that's it for now.

leaving for a phone call... ahem.. ahem...

bye then and keep mailing

--- "Kozhikkattuthody, Rajeev"
wrote:
> So hows it going? Me settling down over here -
> moving into a new place
> this weekend - got shitloads of work -tough times
> ahead
> This is small town america man - today went into a
> typical americam rest
> for lunch - a full geriatric ward o'er there i must
> say - a quaint
> Pleasantville sorta place.
> I am feel so squeaky clean after coming over here -
> people just smile at
> you and wish a good day man!! And to think that when
> i heard seatle i
> had grunge and alternative culture in mind :-|
>
> I dont have amit's or lux's tcs.com FQDN mail id
> except that Amit
> jai/CHN/TCS bit..Convey my regards to them..
> Also whats the news at Tidel and JNR? Who's hot and
> whats not?
>
> ta-ta
> Rajeev
>
>
> psst..hey met badri ..went for a coffee out to the
> famous starbucks!! he
> cudnt recognize met since i had taken off my musty..
>
>
>
>
>

o.k. the anti chess whatever was a good hit.

for the first time i saw some life in the corpses

and the 13h floor looked alive.

started of the blog thing. mass mailed all of them.

btw, lotus notes has a neat feature for importing email id's to your address book.

o.k. it's better than it actually looked.

so i do have to give it the nod.

rajeev wrote to me today

man i do miss him

since he went onsite and amit left for jnr.

life's become quite bleak.

lux goes home at lunch

so if not for parul l would have to take lunch alone.

found a new friend in arun.

glad to have him around

weekend's coming up and so are my spirits.

@confusion

today i had to collect the email id's of all those who work for AWS@Tidel@TCS.

good. so i decided that i would ask around.

I mean a company would maintain a list of all it's employees right!

So first shot, I looked around in Lotus Notes for all AWS employees mailing list.

I found it but unfortunately it was a collection of all id's for people who had registered for the mailing list.

So besides not having everybody's mail id, we had mail id's of quite a few who weren't AWS.

Plus, lots of these guys have now gone onsite or moved to other projects so they are not strictly associated with AWS at all.

O.K.

Now the mail id's here were in varying formats. From the LDAP ones, to Lotus note ones to the dreaded @chennai.tcs.co.in ones to tcs.com ones.

Btw, why is it that LDAP isn't structured properly.

I mean we could have subprojects within TCS and locate somebody using subprojects, or location.

Unfortunately none of this is feasible.

Since I needed a complete list of it, I decided to ask around in the billing section all the employee ids who are associated with AWS.

They gave me a list and since there was no way to get an email id from the employee number I decided to mail all of them and send me their email ids.

Second surprise.

Lots of our staff are not associated with AWS.

That is they are billed under different projects but work for AWS.

Great!

Plus the billing section carries only the information of all those who are billed under AWS.

So where exactly is the piece of information I want.

A comprehensive list of who all works for TCS.

If Raghu wants it what does he do?

Does he carry it round in his head?

random musings

gmail seems to be down.

btw, this is a beautiful example of a zen design

testing shitty stuff is still a shitty job.

why can't they automate this using winrunner.

i agree with sandeepa.

winrunner is the way to go....

but then who will test the scripts we write...

The Meaning of Liff

here's The Meaning of Liff

the only thing that tops this is the meaning of 42.

the twelfth floor is dead.

maybe they should have called it the thirteenth floor.

i think i now understand the sudden need to start err... startups.

to wear a ponytail, do your own fun thing. and keep doing it.

read the meaning of liff all of yesterday.

good. brilliant is not the word for it.

douglas is peerless.

he really really helped me out of quite a terrific spot didn't he.