Amit Kumar's Blog

Decision making is an important activity, not only for executives but for everyone in the world. In our day to day life, we make lot of decisions. Starting from choosing between chocolate and strawberry to life and death, we make tons of quick decisions unconsciously. Some of these decisions may not be so important but some can be really vital and may result in disaster. We choose actions from opinions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions and memories.  While pursuing AMDA Silver certification, I came across a white paper on Decision Making which explained lot of interesting hidden traps that a decision maker may ignore while decision making. In this blog, I would like to share some of those common traps which we should avoid while making a decision. Anchoring Trap : When considering a decision, mind gives disproportionate weight to the first information it receives. You can try it!! If I ask you two questions: a)  ...

Hi Everyone!!   Yesterday, I was having a discussion with one of my colleague on how to empower your web page to make it visible on the first page when searched from a search engine like Google. Just putting across my understanding on the same based on learning from several sources–   Search engine has always fascinated me in the way it searches across millions of pages, filter them and gives us the pages which we want. There is definitely a smart algorithm that does the background work.   Crawler-based search engines – This type of search engines use a process called Web crawling / spidering.   Such search engines (e.g. Google) create their listings automatically. They crawl (in literal terms) the web and then people search through what they have found. If we change our web pages, such search engines eventually detect the changes and that can affect how the web pages are listed. Details on web crawling could be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_cr...

  I believe all of us have a “leader” within ourselves. It’s just a matter of knowing and improving on those leadership traits. If you know how to lead yourself, you can lead others as well. During last session with my team, I raised the topic about leader and leadership qualities. We had a good discussion on that. However, I couldn’t go into more details around it, due to lack of time. So, thought to share my views here.   Since my childhood, I have been learning and studying a lot on this topic. I grew up seeing the red flag with a tiger in the centre – the flag of Forward Bloc party founded by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He inspires me a lot. My close friends think that there is a rebel within me too. But, let’s not discuss that now J . Fortunately, I did my schooling from Sainik School, which also provided me an environment where one has to come across this subject everyday.   Well, talking about the leaders, everyone has someone as their favourite leader. If we clos...

Hi Everyone, On last Friday, I finished working on automating the generation and mailing of a report. Got to learn few interesting way of generating reports directly from SQLPLUS without any extra effort and would like to share that with you. SPOOL ON/OFF is a common functionality in SQLPLUS to write the output of query into a file. Following lines will send the output to C:\test.txt file. SQL> SPOOL C:\test.txt SQL> select * from employee; ---- assuming that employee is an existing table. SQL> SPOOL OFF Now, we might be interested in creating output report in excel format. Simplest way will be: SQL> SET COLSEP ‘,’ SQL> SPOOL C:\test.csv    --- filename with “.csv” as extension SQL> select * from employee; ---- assuming that employee is an existing table. SQL> SPOOL OFF Open test.csv in excel and you are there. But, what if we need output in HTML format????? ………………Well, there is a way to do this as well in SQLPLUS. See below: SQL > SET MARKUP HT...

While authoring a script recently on Windows XP, which was to be executed by windows scheduler, I used a tool called “Blat” (already in use in one of the application in our group) which helps in sending email. On command line, the syntax would be like the one below:   C:\> blat –to <To Email Adress> -from <From Email Adress> -server <SMTP Server Name> -body “<body text>” –subject “<Subject>”   For further details, refer to http://www.blat.net   On Windows XP, I had to write a ".bat" file and schedule it in Scheduled Tasks option. However, on Windows 7, there are in-built option for scheduling of sending emails.   1. Go to Control Panel -> Scheduled Task -> Create Basic Task 2. Specify the Trigger i.e. when to run the task (Date, time, recurrence etc.) 3. In Action, there are 3 options:          Start a Program    // Will execute any program  ...

Yes, they really can. Yesterday, I noticed that one of the sequence number (pol_no_seq) in our IH application was giving different set of results when accessed (pol_no_seq.nextval) from two different machines. When I shared this observation with colleagues, the feedback was something like "It does not make sense" and frankly speaking, even I thought the same :-) But, how could I ignore what I actually saw with my own eyes ? I was really puzzled. Given below is the explanation of what and why it happenned, based on my findings from some forums: Definition of pol_no_seq : CREATED 25-JAN-07 LAST_DDL_TIME 25-JAN-07 SEQUENCE_OWNER INSURANCE SEQUENCE_NAME POL_NO_SEQ MIN_VALUE 1 MAX_VALUE 1000000000000000000000000000 INCREMENT_BY 1 CYCLE_FLAG N ORDER_FLAG N CACHE_SIZE 200 LAST_NUMBER 2802765 Results : Machine A : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000146 Machine A : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000147 Machine B : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000412 Machine ...

So many times, I have seen that there are many ways of achieving a result in java. Most often, we tend to use clasess/methods provided by JDK which is infact a good practise but sometimes, it is actually quite simpler without using them. Hey, what if we have a task of developing a small java program to list the names of all files in a particular directory. It looks like the simplest way of achieveing this would be : Using File.list() or File.listFiles() after confirming that current file is a directory. However, there could be another simpler way which does not use utility methods of File class: public class dirList { public static void main(String args[]) { for (int i=0; i<args.length;i++) { System.out.println(args[i]); } } } Now, compile and run this program dirList from the particualr directory whose listing is to be done. The argument to be passed is asterisk (*) .. i.e. java dirList * This would give us desired result. Actually, * in...