praveensg.com

Police curry is the nick Praveen gave it after eating the egg curry that i made today. So i asked him why Police curry? Thats when he said,” the cops in India(usually belonging to the Maratha family) are known for their Non-veg cooking”. I was quite surprised when he told me about a cop who lived near our home in Bijapur who was very popular for his cooking (double income, nice!!). He charged a whopping 300Rs just for a serving of his delicious Chicken Curry. Wow! Gotta try that. Another one that goes on my “To Do in Bijapur” list.

Back to my Police curry, after gobbling it all, thought of scribbling the recipe real quick. Maybe i should consider charging Praveen too mmm…

Ingredients-
For 4 eggs.
Note- my measurements are usually eyeball amounts.

1 small finely chopped onion
Half a can tomato sauce/puree
2-3 tbsp coconut milk
1 finely chopped green chilli
2 tbsp minced garlic
2 tbsp grated ginger
2-3 curry leaves
2-3 mint leaves
1-2 tbsp red chilli powder
1-2 tbsp coriander powder
1 tbsp turmeric powder
Half tbsp garam masala powder
1 tbsp chai masala
1 tbsp heavy cream
5 tbsp of Olive oil
2 cups water (for consistency)
some freshly ground black pepper
salt to taste
Cilantro to garnish.

Method-
1. Boil water. Add the eggs to the boiling water for 10-15 mins or until hard boiled. Swtich of the heat and add some ice
cubes. When the eggs cool, peel the shell and cut them into horizontal halves.
2. In a pan, heat some olive oil. Add the halves one by one and fry them until golden brown on both sides. Rest them on a
tissue paper to remove all the excess oil.
3. To this residue of oil, add the chopped onion and fry until translucent. Then add the minced garlic, ginger, curry leaves,
green chillies and fry for 2 mins. Later add the tomato sauce/puree, coconut milk and cook for another 2 mins. Add the
chilli powder, coriander powder, turmeric powder, garam masala powder, chai masala, freshly ground pepper and salt to
taste. Cover and cook for 3-5 mins or until the oil starts to leave its ends.
3. To this mixture add water and boil.
4. After a boil, add the heavy cream, the fried eggs and mint leaves. Simmer and cook for 10 mins.
5. Garnish with Cilantro and serve hot accompanied by Basmati rice or wheat Roti’s.

ENJOIIE!

While working on one of my projects, I had a requirement to resize user uploaded images before storing them to the web server. My prime concern while resizing an image was losing the aspect ratio. Since there isn’t anything readily available in the Framework, I decided to look around and I found Rufan Redi’s blog post. I have taken that code forward and come up with a refactored C# version that could be used as part of a library. Thanks Rufan for your insightful post.

Download Source

If you see this page on my blog, then ScribeFire rocks

Steven “Doc” List has been kind enough to post pics from the recently held Agile Austin Open Space Conference. Since I’m still relatively new to the group, I’m yet to acquaint myself with all the people and their names. Please excuse me if I left out any “important” ones.

Jeff Palermo, CTO of HeadSpring Systems

The ever-charismatic Scott Bellware who is also pretty active on the ADNUG group.

Sharon Cichelli and did I mention I just love her blog?

Joe Ocampo, the Agile evangelist

Robert Stackhouse as laid back as ever

Chad Myers

Me me me

The link to the set is here

Thanks Doc for the great pix.

I’m not sure any of you guys have faced this problem but this has been a major issue for me on many of my projects. The problem I’m talking about is when you have that one file that you excluded from your project but forgot to delete from your hard drive and it somehow makes it to production without your knowledge! Or if you have an application that loads user controls at run-time or does http calls to other parts of the application at run-time. You made sure that you ‘excluded’ the file from your project but somehow it shows up. This could be applied to various kinds of files (think about overriding stylesheets).

The problem gets exacerbated when you’re working with a team and you merge your projects every now and then. Different team members work on multiple releases of the app (usually at the same time!) and team members include/exclude files over time. Then you have that big ‘merge party’ where you decide to merge all your branches. The problem arises when you try to merge project files. Many popular source control providers (hint: ahem, starts with a V) do not let you merge your project files. So what do you do? You just decide to use one of the several project files your team has been working on. So now you have a project with multiple files excluded (your team member didn’t like the way you implemented that class and excluded it;)) which were previously part of the project. The project compiles fine, however you have those old files lying on your disk. You use xcopy or some other utility to copy your files while creating your build package and boom, you have a file that’s not supposed to be there in your build.

You might argue why not just use the show/hide toggle on solution explorer. Well that would work well if you had a project with say 10-15 files but imagine enterprise level apps with 1000s of classes/files.

This add-in is a simple utility that lets you see what files are not part of your project. The program is still in Beta meaning it does not actually let you ‘clean’ your files but I promise to update it this weekend. Please feel free to provide feedback.
Download here

Stumbled upon this doing a Google image search. Don’t ask me what I was searching for. Enjoy!

Now this is huge. ITunes finally surpasses Walmart as the biggest music retailer in the United States. They have sold a whopping 4 billion songs since 2003. Though I am not a big fan of Apple’s business models where they very well could charge you even for calling out their name too loud and I have never owned an Apple product (ok, but for this one :D), I must say this is a major breakthrough for the company. All said and done, I must admit, they are a hip company with really hip products and a lot of people love them which is what matters to me. How you ask? Well look here. I have invested heavily in this money minting company. I’ve managed to develop some nerves of steel with the stock’s journey from 200 all the way down to 115 and back up to 150+ now. Just because I believe the iPhone is going to be the next iPod or even better. In fact, there have been a few signs in that directions lately (iPhones running out of stock!).

Coming back to Apple, due credit, I must say, should go to Steve Jobs for turning around an underdog into one of the coolest companies in American history. Some analysts predict that Apple might turn out to be the first trillion dollar company in the world. Now that might be a stretch and could take quite a while too, but I’d not be surprised if they come up with the next killer product that might change the fortunes of the company overnight. They might already have?

Here is the ITunes news link

It had been a while since I’d checked out what was happening back home. The first site I go to to get my dose of desi news is www.rediff.com and since I’m a huge Bollywood buff, the movie section in there is my all time favorite. Well, to my surprise, there wasn’t much news on the site only to later realize that it was a holiday back home for Good Friday aka Easter. I am having to work my ass off on a Friday living in a Christian-dominated country and our Indian brethren get to celebrate Good Friday? Talk about being secular! I’m just jealous Anyways, without digressing. There were a few headlines spread here and there and one of them was the review of the latest Abbas-Mustan offing, Race. I have always liked AM movies for they are only guys who exclusively are dedicated to making action/suspense/thriller movies back home. And Race seemed to be exactly that, only this time around, they have gone bonkers with the budget and also have like the three hottest girls of Bollywood (1, 2 and check this one out 3).

I have always been a great fan of Raja Sen, the ace Rediff reviewer and usually go by his advice when it comes to Bollywood flicks. He is a no nonsense reviewer and does seem to suit my taste. However, this time around, his no-nonsense behavior went a little too far. As I proceed to read the article, behold, the first sentence I see, he gives away the climax. Seriously, I’m not kidding. The whole damn climax, right in front of your eyes. And he looks pretty damn confident in giving it away. I know, he must not have liked the movie which is why the 1.5 stars. But that is not the question here. The question is about moral ethics of a responsible scribe. You would at least put a spoiler alert in there. I think Raja wanted to look ubercool this time and he tried to come up with a really bold review. And what better way to look cool than to spill beans right off the bat. But Mr. Sen, this was not cool at all. In fact this is totally irresponsible behavior from a well-respected journalist like you and for this behavior of yours, you do owe an apology to your readers as well as the producers of the movie. Agreed, the movie might have sucked beyond imagination but do you realize how much work might have gone into the making of the movie? Producers spend millions and there is a whole crew that slogs its ass for years together to come up with a movie and you just write it off in what, 30 mins? C’mon, give us a break. I’m not sure how many people even read your reviews but I’m certain you have managed to change quite a few minds today; one of them being mine, to not read your reviews anymore that is.

For the ones who missed Raja’s review and do not know the suspense yet, I’m going to point them to a review that is more balanced > Taran Adarsh’s review

Recently, I stumbled upon this survey for mobile phone device satisfaction levels. iPhone, to my surprise, topped the ratings with an astounding 82pc. I say ‘to my surprise’ since it’s been just under a year since the launch. There is a very weird phenomenon I’ve observed with the iPhone; people who own it love it and those who don’t absolutely hate it. Now as a proud owner of an iPhone, I know why people hate it

link

Edit: Ok, there seems to be some disconnect in the charts that the above site has and the one I ’stumbled’ upon.

Here it is

Just added a page for my portfolio. It’s a work in progress, so please do keep checking back.

Link here