Recent Entries

MBA - Orientation

I am going to start part-time MBA this fall at Jenkins School of Management which is part of the North Carolina State University. Today was our first full day of orientation which turned out to be very informative and exciting. The day started with breakfast and an introductory session by the Dean of Business School. It was followed by following sessions and then lunch (which was just ok).

  • Academics and course sequence
  • Logistics
  • Q&A session with existing MBA students
  • Career resources and coaching available to NCSU MBA students

However the most interesting part of the entire orientation was the team development session by Dr Tony O'Driscoll who is definitely an excellent and entertaining speaker. I'll try to write more about this session later however these were few highlights.

  • How to be effective and efficient at the same time
  • Paradigm
  • P/PC Balance
  • Ladder of Inference
  • Win-Win Thinking

Overall I am feeling excited to start this new chapter in my life. More about all this later.....

Site was down briefly

My site was down for almost two weeks as I wasn't aware that my hosting company decided to phase out the server where this site lives. I was in no position to complain as this site was hosted there for free :)

Anyways last weekend, I decided to move the site to a new host HostingAtoZ whose prices are very reasonable for a site like this which doesn't get a lot of traffic.

Everything went smooth except that this new host has setProfileString and getProfileString functions blocked which are used by the version of BlogCFC running this site. Anyways it took few modification to the code based on the direction here and everything seems to work well (at least for now).

Happy Birthday - Ahmed Rasheed

Last weekend was a memorable day for our small family. It was the first birthday of our cute little son "Ahmed Rasheed" who was born on July, 12th last year. I am sure those of you with a kid in the house will be in agreement to the excitement and happiness that surround this great milestone.

Time really flies very quickly as it just seem like yesterday when we brought Ahmed from hospital and probably for the first time in my life, I was feeling very nervous while driving. Anyways we are thankful for such a great gift and wish him a great and prosperous future.

CFLog4j - Interesting enhancements by Eric

I wrote cflog4j last year while working with an application at work that needed significant amount of logging. CFLog4j is essentially a ColdFusion based wrapper around the powerful Java library for logging i.e. log4j. I also wrote few Fusebox lexicons to log activity from the circuit files as that was the framework of choice at my last job. I haven't had a chance to improve and extend the original code for a while now. However Eric Knipp has been doing some excellent work with this project. Here are few blog posts related to this topic.

  1. ColdFusion and Log4j
  2. ColdFusion & Log4j Part 2 - Writing Logs to a Database
  3. ColdFusion & Log4j Part 3 - Custom Attributes and Mapped Diagnostic Context

Thanks Eric!

New job - new beginnings !!!!

Last week was my last at INDUS Corporation where I worked for almost 5 years on a government contract with NTP. I started my career at INDUS as a junior programmer and worked my way up the corporate ladder to become Project Manager/Technical Lead. I truly enjoyed my career at INDUS and made some good friends. However now I feel that it is my time for a new challenge and experience.

Today was my first day of orientation with SRA International where I will be working as Sr Software Architect Lead on a goverment contract with NIEHS. I am very excited about this new and challenging opportunity as I'll be leading a team of 5-6 developers. We will be providing support and maintenance for over 50 ColdFusion applications and developing new ones as needed.

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." -- William James