Credit card "offers"...

I was never a fan of the modus operandi of the credit card companies. Be it here in India, where they are let loose by the law, or in US where there are strict laws on what they can and cannot do, they seem to find ways to trick users into believing this new "offer" is the best thing in the world.

Today, I received a statement from my credit card company. Usually, I just do a cursory scan through the statement, and doesn't look much into the detail. I belong to that category of credit card holders, who pay the full amount due every month, and pay "no interest" to the credit card companies. So they are trying to find new ways to extract money out of me. I think what I saw in my credit card was one such attempt. There was one line saying "Safety Net EMI 01 of 12 - Rs 79.00".

I started wondering, what in the world is this safety net. I don't remember buying any such thing. To top that, I don't buy anything with EMIs. When I looked further, there was this line, somewhere in the bottom of the card, saying "PRINCIPAL BALANCE ON EASY PAY - Rs 869.00". I got a bigger shock then. So I decided to call the credit card company to find out what this is all about.

Calling credit card customer care is not something I enjoy doing. They have a telephonic menu hierarchy built so complex, that you will never find how to really talk to a customer service (or no-service?) agent. It went "press 1 for the list of your last 5 transactions", "press 2 for..." etc. till "press 6 for.." No "press for" to talk to a customer service agent. So I started pressing numbers which were not listed. By intution I pressed "0", and I believe I got lucky this time. The information I got was that "this is an offer to the customers"!!! An offer which charges me for Rs 950!!! And that too without my knowledge. I immediately asked the individual to cancel that "offer". I am going to write a formal letter to the credit card company about this.

I used to this radio talk show by the person named "Clark Howard", when I used to live in Milwaukee. I liked his advices on credit/debit card usages. Interested, you can click here to see Clark's tips on credit cards.

Recently, there was an article in Readers Digest about credit card fraud. What they found was shocking. I would recommend everyone to read that article. After reading that article, I started noticing that in majority of the places I went, the person who swipe the card never verify the signature on the card vs the signature you put on the slip. So anyone can purchase anything using a stolen card, and you are liable to pay for it - unless you call the credit card company before the actual charge has occurred...

Dan Brown Books

I finished reading the third Dan Brown book - "Digital Fortress".

Only recently I started reading english books. Until now, I thought that I was a slow reader, when it came to reading story books. But I amazed myself by finishing the entire book over a weekend - with all the distractions with kids, grocery list and other errands.

The first one I read was "Da Vinci Code". I picked that because I saw many people reading it. Some, in our office, some during my last trip to Milwaukee and back. I did not have the courage to ask any of them about the book, because of my own ignorence about english novels. I had seen a bunch of english movies based on John Grisham. I realized it only after watching those movies, that they originally were books published, etc. Then on, I had this burning desire within me to read at least one book, before it became a movie. So when I saw many people reading "Da Vincy Code", I felt this book might become a movie sometime. That's how I ended up picking up "Da Vinci Code".

I was fascinated by the story, and liked his simple language, that I decided to buy "Angels and Deamons". This one too, was really good. I liked the Dan's way of explaining seemingly complex technical stuff like particle physics. I took around a couple of weeks to finish each book.

Then recently I found an sale going on in eBay, for the remaining two books Dan Brown had authored. So I didn't hesitate to place the order, and witihin the next couple days, I found myself reading one of the two - "Digital Fortress". Even though the story is not as interesting as the earlier two, I kept reading, mainly because it was a story about the field which I am working on - computers. I enjoyed this book as well.

I finished reading that book yesterday. Got one more to go - Deception Point. I will read that during my trip to Kerala next week.

Make it a better place...

Whlie driving to office today morning, I was listening to Michael Jackson's famous song - "Man in the Mirror"... The theme of the song is stated in the lines: "If you wanna make the world a better place, Take a look at yourself, and then make a Change"

How many times do we think about others not doing the right thing, while assuming that we are perfect, and we do everything right. This comes from our own self righteousness and selfish mind. We ignore alltogether that there re so many blemishes in our own thoughts and actions, and go on trying to correct others.

Just a thought...

Eclipsed!

It has been a few months since I downloaded and started using NetBeans and Eclipse for java development. At the end of six months, I have become a big fan of ECLIPSE.

The following are the biggest contributors in turning me into an eclipse fan.

Look and feel: I think this has a lot to do with the default font and color selection. Whatever it is, I prefer the look and feel of eclipse compared to NetBeans or JBuilder.

Responsiveness of the application: One of my biggest gripes about java IDEs was about the responsiveness of the application. I type fast. And after Microsoft Visual C++ IDE, eclipse is the IDE which I used so far, that could match my speed. (I am not denying the fact that there could be other Java IDEs which I haven't tried yet.)

Clearcase Integration: Works well with the clearcase plugin. So you don't have to switch back and forth between the browser and IDE when you have to edit a file that is checked in.

Refactoring support: I never took automatic refactoring seriously until I experimented with the refactoring features available with eclipse. Now, I realize that refactoring code is not at all a headache, especially when you have to handle renaming and re-packaging of classes. The clearcase integration makes it a breeze.

Perspectives - debug, development & java browsing: This is another cool feature. Depending on what you are doing - coding, just browsing the code or debugging - eclipse offers different perspectives, which are nothing but screen layouts whcih display the relavent sub windows. The debug perspecitve provides a debug window with the list of active threads, Variables window which show the currently active variables, an Expression window to evaluate expressions, console, etc.

My job require me to do a lot of code review. The java browsing perspective is ideal for that. Another nice feature I use extensively while reviewing code is the task tags. I define a tag named "CODEREVIEW", and add my code review comment in the code itself at the location I want it. One rebuild will give me a list of these tags in the Tasks list. Copy paste that to another document and code review comments are ready. The person responsible for code review fixes can open it up in eclipse, click through the auto-generated list in eclipse and take care of them.

Remote debugging: This is the feature that helped me a lot. I have to debug applications running on a target, but it is not practical for me to install an IDE and sources on it. I haven't explored this feature in NetBeans. JBuilder gives this feature in the developer version which is highly overpriced.

What is missing in eclipse ? I would say that a UI builder is missing in eclipse. But I don't feel the need for a graphical UI builder even though I have to develop UI based applications.

Why..? I will come to it in my next post...

Indian IT - Is it becoming less competitive in the global market...?

India and it's IT industry has been the major beneficiaries of the IT outsourcing that happened in the past few years. Lower cost and abundant availability of english speaking technical talent were the biggest plus points for India.

But, are we losing that advantage to countries like China..?

The biggest disadvantage which China had in the past was the lack of enough english speaking talent, and the lack of control over piracy and intellectual property violations. But they are around 50% cheaper than their Indian counterparts. And Chinese government seem to be acting on getting the talent pool and getting their act together in controlling piracy. That seems to be good enough reason for majority of the major players in the IT industry. And China has been doing PR campaign in a large scale to boost their IT industry.

So, you can see that in the next five to ten years, India can lose its competitive advantage over China, w.r.t outsourcing.

What is India's answer to these challenges..? Cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai & Chennai are becoming costlier every day. One answer is in developing other cheaper alternatives to these expensive cities.

We, as Keralites, should look at the development of Smart City as an answer to this challenge. This can in addition to help generate the jobs that is crucial for the states development, will also provide an alternative to the big cities because it can provide the cost advantage compared to them.