Functionals: People getting paid to generate work for the technicals!!

The most important thing I want to say before i start is that all characters in this blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people (Visible or Invisible) is purely coincidental. Also this is dedicated to Anil, Binay, Sushant and Sandeep, the four pillers of CG JD Edwards practice.

This is a small part of the eternal fight that's being taking place between the logical community (techies) and the Illogical community (Funcies) of the JD Edwards world. Am sure such conflicts happen as in other universes also but in JDE world we only need to maintain a maximum of 30% utilization unlike the minimum of 100% of others. So we get time to blog about the inequalities of our world.

We often have discussions on the importance of each group during our MANY private meeting, majority of them in the closely monitored cubicles surrounded by super-efficient techies. So to make you understand how it actually goes, I'll illustrate this with a good example. Let the Funci be IM (Invisible man) and the Techi be LM (Logical Man)

LM: Wazzup Guys? (Techies socialize a lot)

IM: Saala, abhi bhi zinda hai? (They don't want us to live, but want us to work)

LM: No work? As usual sitting idle doing nothing? As much expected from a Funci who gets paid to torture Techies.

IM: Hum log nahi hothe tho dekh lete, thum log ke paas karne ko kuch nahi hote (Very true.. without funcies, it would have been a heavily paid job for doing nothing)

LM: We know. If you guys don't do any blunder, what rework will we do? The major part of the income of the software industry is because (not by) of the Functional guys. They understand everything wrong, and make the techies do it wrong even when the techies know its wrong (refer discussion 2, also since Funcies consider themselves to be the most sophisticated and intelligent creatures, they rather make the techies do the rework rather than listen to them when they are right). And for what purpose? So that more rework will come and more revinue is generated.

IM: Hum log nahi hote tho clients ka requirement kaise samajthe? (As if we don't know English)

LM: Hum log samajne jaathe, to sirf work hota, rework nahi

....

...

..

And as expected from any discussion involving logic at one end, this is never converted to an argument and also truth (logic) always wins!

There are few other discussions that illustrates the basic crux and those will be published from time to time as comments as it happens. I thank Mr. Patel for providing valuable inputs on which these are based.

Discussion 2:

LM2: Yes I will do it, it's logical

IM1: No No don't do this, client will be happy, do this I should be happy even if it’s illogical

Discussion 3:

Case 1: (When there is pending work)

IM1: We have to do it

LM2: Yes

LM work like donkey and completes the work.

Case 2: (Work Completed)

LM1: I have done it

IM2: [blank face] There is a slight change in the requirement

Happy Married Life: A theoretical blunder

Cautionary Warning: If you lack commonsense or sense of humor, don’t bother reading this. I wrote this not for the morons but for witty guys.

I was actually trying to write on "How marriage sucks the happiness out of every person" but realized in a team meeting involving majority of them (by them, I mean the unhappy people) that it was not a good idea to hurt their emotions and also that this might end up harming (physically) me instead. By hurting the emotions, I meant that they are already getting accustomed to their life and even a slight ray of false hope or real enlightenment might turn everything upside down. Not that I didn't mean to do it, but they are my friends after all.

From what I observed till now, in life, happiness and sadness are both two faces of the same coin, without one the other is meaningless. If you are a bachelor and really think that you are screwed beyond anything possible, just look at the married man sitting near you and you'll understand how easy and free your life is. This reminds me of a friend of mine, whose name I dare not speak. He, though not married yet, still understands the meaning of "lack of freedom". Poor chap recently got engaged and now has to take permission from his fiancé before taking any action (by that I mean even before washing his hands before food). Now a day he just thinks and talks about just one topic: “if so now, what later (after marriage)?”

Another best part of marriage is, there is no "other side of the river is always green”, it’s just “this side of the river is always dry". Everyone tends to understand how much dry the other side of the river might be. And also when they give condolences, it’s always comes from deep within the heart. They are able to sympathize as they have also travelled in the same boat before, and are still travelling in fact.

Few months after marriage these people tend to justify everything, even when unasked for. After being asked explanation for each and everything they do at home, it becomes a habit and they can't let go off that even when they are having a lunch with friends or having a discussion with clients. In some worse cases, they start asking too much questions. Questions that have the obvious answers, still they have no other option but to ask.

The main topics of discussion for the unhappy people vary from the food they made to the clothes they washed. As free-will, free-thinking and free-speech is a blasphemy after marriage, these people are never able to discuss on any worthy topic like Black-holes or curvature of space-time continuum or even politics. All they can think about are ways to channelize the pressurized frustration they have accumulated in their long run.

Bad thing about them is they never tend to disclose the depth of their pain in front of bachelors. They always tend to say that live a very happy life, but many a times I have seen their eyes all watering up while talking, may be because they realized how peaceful their life was before marriage. I seriously think that, after being unable to share their innermost sorrows and fright for so long, they become trained disciplined zombies (Just eat and move) who just work and behave socially.

Once we asked an unhappy guy what he thinks is the biggest advantage of marriage is? And his answer was Discipline. He said you lose your free will and ends up doing only approved things at the approved time that you turn out to be a disciplined (pupil). Also, according to him we don't need to provide military training till the concept of marriage lasts in our society. In the beginning he was joking, later on we realized that he was dead serious after seeing pearls of tears on his cheek. Another example he gave about enjoyments in marriage is a story as follows:

There was a man who never listened to music. He always loved movies and drama and all the colors of light. Then one day an accident happened and he lost his vision. He was bored to hell and had nothing to do. Then as this continued, he had no choice but to listen to music as it was the only available mode of entertainment left for him. In the long run he started enjoying music. Now in case of every unhappy man, the accident is his or her marriage. By the time they realize that it was an accident, they are too late and miles away from recovery.

Some cases we have even observed that, people after suffering for long, tend to lose the difference between Real and Imaginary. I assume that this is caused because of the asynchronism between their Dreams and Realities they face after marriage. Such cases they usually start laughing when they are sad or being punished (We haven’t observed the other way round as for them it’s an imaginary concept)

So the final conclusion is –

Marriage is just like Coma, except that you feel pain in the initial stages.

As suggested by a close friend of mine, who seems to share similar thoughts, to make the views clear, I've embedded a video of Pearl Jam. And noobs, please don't worry lyrics are included.

The fourth kind

According to a highly funded research conducted by a renown anthropologist, the humans are divided into three kinds by their ability to do mistakes

1. People who learn from other's mistakes
2. People who learn from their mistake and
3. People who never learn

For easy understanding of people who don't understand the meaning of anthropology, lets call the first category "ball-less", the second category as "balled" and the third as "steel-balls".

Ball-less

This category people consider themselves to be the most brilliant people alive. But to be frank, intelligence level of these people are just average. The biggest difference between them and the other humans is that, they have no guts to do anything or take any decision. Or in simple English, they have no balls. I'll illustrate this with a very good example: 

Let X be a ball-less and Y be a non-ball-less

X sees that Y lost 20% of his invested money in a very bad move. He concludes that equity share trading is very risky and only fools do it. They never understand or try to understand the famous quote that "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing" and study about the market and then invest. They just back off ignoring the millions of people who actually make profit.

Balled

These people are the most commonly found human subspecies. Majority of them are ambiverts and always carry a will to live, even if they lose both their hands and legs are sure to be bedridden for the rest of their life. They take risk as they understand that world runs on the theory of "no risk, no profit" but they always play safe. It can be easily assumed that majority of us (Working class people) come under this category and wish to stay here. They always strive to maintain equilibrium between the different roles they lead in their life and get greatly disturbed when something goes out of sync. We can find huge variation in the intelligence levels of the people in this category. Also the risk they take is always directly proportional to their level of intelligence. 

Steel Balls

These guys are the guys with real steel balls. They don't know how or what they are doing but they just do it. Majority of the people who are actually successful or I would say satisfied in their life are of this category. Also the people who were successful but now live on the roadside are also from this category. They don't think, they just leap. They won't even think twice before betting their entire life savings on a poker game. Many a times these people are misinterpreted as morons by the other two categories because of their blind risk taking habit but there is a very high probability that they end up regretting that.

So to conclude this article i present to you the distribution graph created by a very complex calculation, which unfortunately cannot be disclosed:

Foot Note: Any queries regarding this article is deeply appreciated but would be more appreciated if it's kept to oneself!

JD Edwards: The first hardware-independent ERP

Don’t take the subject line the literal way, what I mean to say is independent of the configuration of the system on which we install JDE fat client, it always runs slow (JDE guys – You know the truth, Others – Please take this the humorous way, after all it’s a known fact that JD Edwards is the first as well as the best ERP and also first in all sorts of breakthroughs). The best example to illustrate this phenomenon is “Sandy’s Calculator”. 

For the simple minded people, to understand the concept of Sandy’s Calculator let me elaborate on the salient features of this magical box:

1. The only Window’s based system where the remote desktop applications are accessed faster than the kernel applications.
2. You can never use outlook on this system. There are a few interesting theories behind this  
   a) It takes an hour to boot. so there is no other option but to
       use some other system to check the mails when you get to
       office.
   b) If it’s some urgent mail you have to send, there is no
       guarantee that you will be able to send or that the mail will
       move from your outbox to your send mails
   c) You cannot use Outlook in this system because if you run
       Outlook, that will be the only process that’s actually running
       on the system.
3. If you have no Citrix client installed, forget remote desktop. RDA is too heavy for the calculator. (All thanks to Microsoft processes which consumes RAM as if all computers are supercomputers)
4. The time required for the boot is very much in sync with the time required for the shutdown, so no one can actually afford to shut it down until and unless the only thing you do in office is switch on the system and shutdown it down (ideal for certain people).
5. No one is sure if this laptop has any inbuilt speakers as the only sound we ever heard was the sound of the rattling fan striking on the borders of the laptop base.
6. You cannot use any IDEs because of the system configurations. So you have to be an expert coder as all you can use is notepad. And also please forget compiling. That might just be the last thing you ever do on the calculator.
7. The last time Sandy took that to ITICS, the technical guy literally cried and sandy ended up offering him a kerchief. He even offered Sandy another laptop and offered to display the antique in the annual fest organized by Capgemini University History Division but sandy refused because of the sentimental memories involved.
8. In order to use the keyboard, you have to be thoroughly familiar with the typewriter or else you might end up with broken finger bones.

The only reason I (we) call it the Sandy’s Calculator and not the Sandy’s Abacus is because, unlike Abacus it consumes electricity though the work done by both is nearly the same.

So coming back to JD Edwards’s performance, the quality of work done on the "above mentioned calculator" and on any other "new-age computer" is exactly the same for JDE. It seldom shows any partiality. Few days back in order to understand some flow / setup of JDE (am not sure), everyone was busy on the local systems. But to everyone’s astonishment, Sandy came up with the solution (It’s not a big deal considering how much a patient freaky genius he is - No he is a technical by soul not a funci) after working on that abacus I mean Calculator. So the only possible conclusion other than JD Edwards being hardware independent is, JD Edwards is not from this plain of our universe and that makes it unpredictable to us. But since that’s too much, the only possible conclusion is – Sandy has crossed over from an alternate universe but into the wrong timeline.

Why shouldn’t we have a night out on Sunday night especially when Monday is not a holiday

Long long ago, one Sunday, in mid February, after a consecutive Saturday (I was reading some important stuff which had nothing to do with me or anyone alive nor was it useful to anyone dead or alive in anyway) and a Friday night out (Because of a sadist senior and a brainless junior), I reached home very late (Busy day, had a “sort of” “lets discuss the geo-political issues of this world” meet and then had to attend a surprise birthday treat of a very dear friend of mine who is very much fat but thinks is reducing weight in the long run coz of his five minute walk everyday, which later turned out to be a “I’m screwed” treat – Further details regarding this statement will be published later when the time is right) and decided to watch some (due to unforeseen issues caused by Mr. Castle) episodes of Fringe I had missed earlier. Since it’s always difficult to grab a sleep once we cross the routine sleep time, I had no choice but to play Prince of Persia (The Two Thrones Chapter 29, Just 2 more two go!!) till sleep strikes me (after completing the missing three episodes of Fringe and an episode of Nikita). I had to wait till my morning alarm (I keep that to frustrate my roomie who always wakes up to switch this off before returning back to sleep, but if we look from a broader point of view, it’s nothing compared to the torture he gives the rest of us) to activate my sleep inducing part of the brain (Everyone knows that alarms are the best sleep triggering catalysts).

All thanks to the warm/hot sunlight that started burning my face since 8:00 AM, I was forced not to ignore the cruel intentions of nature by nine. Sigh!! It was not a pleasant sight, mainly coz of the following two reasons: a) I could complete just half my sleep quota of the night and b) It was already 9 and my shift timing was from 9 to 6 (Thank you Capgemini for not forcing us to maintain a 9 hours office time or reach by time though there is always a catch that we all know exists!! Now, if you ever start treating your employees like human beings, you will definitely be something close to a dream job), so I was left with very little time to wind up my morning engagements and rush to office. My long wait for the lift was then followed by the run for the train and the “as-usual” horrible train journey (It’s just five minutes, but horrible is not a quantity which has a time factor in its measuring unit) and the same bus journey and (This is new) the fat moron sitting beside me in the bus listening to some shitty music in loudspeaker (imagine that!!) as if he is the only person who has a Smartphone or could ruin my entire morning.

Anyhow, after all this crap, I reached office to find that there wasn’t any work assigned to me (all the work is in ‘pending further information from others’ status) and Sandy (Mr. Cool dude who assigns me work and motivates me and finally makes me do the work that is 100% boring, unproductive even for our clients – ‘they don’t know what they want and they don’t realize what they have’ and is also a social suicide if someone hears that we still do such outdated work) was on leave.  So what was the whole point in sacrificing my sleep and then come to office and waste this much energy? – Screw the productivity of others, especially of the people sitting near to you.

How to keep the customer unsatisfied even after spending 6000 times more than required for him

As expected from a year old laptop, mine had also started to shake on the table when in use (literally). I had lost a bush (KD did it, I take care of my lappy like a mother of her baby) which was located under the battery of my XPS. Being an industrial Engineer, I was forced to apply the Quality Norms (Basically, Just in Time) and ended up logging a complaint on Feb first week (My warranty expires on March 5^th) for this issue. First we had a small chat on the missing bush, then on the underperformance of the battery (5 hr. backup to 1 hr. in 3 months.. That’s Dell.. Everything is preplanned) and keyboard issues (nothing.. my keyboard simply rocks) etc. etc. and at last we stumbled on the flickering issue (Blurred display when I run on battery). We had a long chat (24 calls with average duration 4 minutes) on this issue basically coz he was more into troubleshooting than into replacing my bush (damn him)

So we carried on with the different troubleshoots (It was very much easy to manipulate considering that am a Linux user :D) and finally he decided that he is going to replace my motherboard as well as my LED display. He was continuously taking decisions on my laptop and I was waiting so that I can take up the "bush-issue" again but he never gave the chance. So finally when he was finished informing me how much screwed up my system is and what a rough user I was, I took up the bush–issue again and this time his observation/analysis/solution was way too quick.

• Dell doesn’t replace just the bush. They have to replace the battery if they want to replace the bush.
• As my battery is performing way beyond the expected level (according to him, dell 9 cell batteries are not supposed to give a backup of more than 30 minutes after 6 months and if its giving, it’s a flaw with the batter and not the other way around), they cannot replace the battery for me even if my laptop is shaking when in use.
• As battery cannot be replaced, we have no choice but to remove the other bush and make it aligned or attach some cotton under the back, so that laptop rests on place

So finally, after this week long discussion to replace a 5 rupee bush for a comfortable use, they are replacing parts worth more than 30K for free and still leaving me (customer) unsatisfied.

Btw, Dell Rockz!! Or to be precise, if any laptop actually rockz, its Dell!!

How to use Google to ruin your vacation using Appspot and Google Cloud SQL

All thanks to Google, now we have a free application server (appspot) and a free (as of now) SQL that too in cloud!!

All this shit started when one day I got a mail from Google announcing its new cloud SQL server (free for a limited time period) and it was written in bold that this work only with appspot only!! So, to test this I had to make an appspot account as well.. Hmmm.. (thanks to Google, all the Google products are interconnected at the most basic lever - user account, so it was not much a pain creating the account for the web app) anyways, coming to basic issues, the most important issue I faced was, I code in C and not in JAVA anymore.. It was ages before that I used JAVA and frankly speaking, it was CRAP.. Everything was there.. There wasn't much left for me to do.. But C is never, it doesn't know anything, so u can research and find out and all you need is the basic knowledge and logic.. More like JD Edwards in the ERP world.. :D

So, what I was saying was, I had to brush up my JAVA knowledge to check out appspot and I needed that to check out the Google Cloud SQL.. But being an engineer, we always have a better, fast and more efficient method than conventional methods (I don't want to hurt anybody's feeling but, facts are facts.. we are the supreme race :P) So i ended up googling out sample codes.. It was a piece of cake.. From basics to pro, everything was given.. That too in a well-mannered way.. So I ended up creating the code (not using cloud SQL as everyone is not having access to that) and then reverse engineering the code I wrote to find out what I actually did.. :D please note that this is not a joke.. I did a quick test and found that it was working as expected.. (I didn't do anything.. Google had provided everything before itself.. It was like implementing a solution so other shitbag designed.. Zero intelligence.. Hmmm..)

I'll write about the issues I faced later on if I feel like later on, but not now.. That itself will need another thousand word to describe.. :D

Later on, implementing the same methodology, I used the cloud SQL to store the data in place of the file system.. This part of the design was quiet good as SQLs always are interesting.. Those are not like JAVA.. I'll write about that incident in the next post.. not now.. Writing all these craps I forgot about the subject of the post :D I actually forgot to mention that I was doing all these when I was at home having my new year vacation.. hmmm.. ohh, and visit: this and this.. and lemme know how it is..