Venu Anuganti Blog

Today, I tried to use my gmail after a long time to store some of my important old mails. I attached a zip file of size ~120MB which has all documents. Initially I forgot the total mail size allowed by gmail, and found later that it only allows a max of 10 MB as the message size including any attachments.

So, atleast I was expecting a nice user friendly error like Mail size exceeded, reduce the size; instead it gave an annoy error message with error code 008 and asked to try again as shown below:

Which ofcourse does not have any meaning to end user nor it is telling what needs to be done; instead asking user to try again; and up on retry; you get the same error…..and never ending

I am trying to test how I can link videos to my site as I am unsuccessful from Yahoo! Video due to various reasons. Lets see if it works, so that I can share some files.

Today, I just had a chance to preview the new Beta Yahoo! web messenger, which is yet to release to public. At first glance, no doubt it will rock in coming days as this is the next generation application; Kudos to the team who is working hard on this.

The major positive points of this new web based messenger is:

• Web interface, and its portable. You can use it any where in the world as long as there is a internet with a decent browser.
• Slick design
• Support for both Yahoo! and Windows Live contacts
• Online history of all the conversations
• Complete contact view that you see in your regular messenger based on groups, sorting on top of it either by name. You can also view only online contacts.
• Search capabilities on Contacts and History, which is a great handy feature for people who needs to dig something back in the history.

These are the features that I wish to have:

• Support of multiple themes
• Customization to allow different font size, type and color
• Support for conference or group chat
• Contact aliasing and alias chat
• Wap or mobile browsers support
• Easy file transfer mechanism
• Highlighting a message based on filtering
• Option to save conversation or history to local file
• Options to enable or disable notifications (regular message or audio) for a new message or based on a filter on a perticular word (like irc/mirc does)
• E-mail, Calender etc notification

Here is the few screen shots:

Welcome Signin Screen:	Intro Screen:
Logged In Screen:	History:

Last few weeks I am kind of busy at work as getting to understand all internal Yahoo! technologies. Atleast having fun back on MySQL related things as I get to work back on this. But after I took Yahoo! offer, had a chance for Oracle InnoDB, but its too late as it might have allowed me to work on InnoDB storage engine remotely. That would have been a idle position as that allows to work remotely. Anyway, Yahoo! is doing good and may be I have a chance down the line to work for Y! bangalore as well.

Last weekend, tried to upgrade from Windows XP SP2 to Vista Ultimate on HP nc6220 laptop. The upgrade finished with out any errors (even though it took more than one hour). But once the upgrade is done; the system keeps rebooting back and forth as it can not boot to Windows Vista. I can only see flashing regular old windows blue screen which appears for few seconds and disappears. Atleast it allowed me to downgrade back to XP; so I did rolled back all the installation, that saved another a day of hassle.

Its really funny how user-friendly the upgrade process is. I know that it will work if I do clean install; but I will loose all the settings; and no updates to my Microsoft Vista Blog.

Second day half day is again went with classes; but they are must needed for any Technical Yahoo! employee to get started. The first class, IT orientation for new hire is on how to setup and get connected to Yahoo! using laptop, vpn and wireless and accessing all intranet portals. The second class, How to be a Yahoo! Engineer is all about differet tools and packages that internal Yahoo! uses along with setting up accessing to corp UNIX boxes, exploring dev portal, internal mailing lists etc. Second class is a recommended class for all new hires, especially if you are part of technical team; but first one is must needed for all new hires.

I could not get my laptop nor desktop yet. Hopefully I might get one tomorrow. After that I need to play a bit to setup all my stuff. It is really bad that I could not yet able to read my yahoo-inc e-mails as Yahoo! does not support web based e-mail. Once I have my laptop; then I might be able to read all the stuff.

Ryan Troll gave his Windows box today till I get one, so get to login to backyard and browse though all the docs. I also subscribed to 10-12 internal mailing lists. Once I have the laptop, I need to have visual studio installed; so that I can build MySQL 5.0.X and play a bit to get started. I also got my RSA secure ID today that I needed for VPN connection.

Today was my first day at Yahoo! and it was totally exciting and fun. Its all day orientation for all new hires and it was done at Building D in Sunnyvale office. Here is the list of items covered as part of orientation:

• Submitting of All Paper Work to HR department
• All About Yahoo!, and its future by PR
• Work Life At Yahoo! by Talent Development Team
• Health Care Benefits, 401K etc
• PayRoll info
• Lunch with Managers (Ryan and Andrew were there)
• Yahoo! Back Yard and all employee related perks
• Security, getting access to Yahoo!
• Travel
• What Made To Join Yahoo! and many more that I can not recollect all at once.

I also got my security badge during the lunch break along with Free Yahoo! backpack. After the orientation is done, I visited my cubicle which is located in building E and nothing is ready yet. Ryan told me that I can expect a laptop and Linux desktop by tomorrow. And surprise is, am getting 24″ HP LCD monitor.

Tomorrow will also be a busy day due to some more classes related to development related things. More follows later …

After I left ANTs Software Inc, I decided to join Yahoo! platform team. Alan Shapiro from Technology Search referred me to this team. I will be reporting to Ryan Troll and headed by Chuck Neerdaels. Yet to understand all the hierachy though within this team

Before posting this; I just completed all the imigration related paper work, so that my H1-B will be transferred to Yahoo!. My joining date is not yet fixed due to this; but once I hear something on the H1-B visa transfer front, then its just a matter of time to get in. I look forward to work for this team, and all my day to day activities will be posted on this blog.