Facebook application re-enabled

About a week back I had posted that my facebook application was disabled by facebook citing negative user feedback. In the same post I had mentioned how it was a bug in their mechanism for understanding user feedback. Today morning I got a mail from the facebook policy team that my app has been re-enabled and that they apologize for the inconvenience.

"Hi,
>
> Your app was temporarily disabled by our automated systems, but it seems to be up and running properly now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
>
> Thanks,
> Platform Policy Team
> Facebook"

How I killed my own facebook application

Last weekend I had developed a Facebook application which will analyze the movies liked by all the friends of the user and then find the three most popular movies and will publish an image into the users album having the cover images of those movies along with the profile pictures of all the friends who like those movies. The same image would be published on the user's wall as well.

Just about two hours after I made my app live and available to the public, I got a mail from Facebook that my app has been disabled because its automated system detected that there was negative feedback regarding my app. I was wondering how this can happen, The only users who use my app were me, my sister, my cousin and a friend and I am sure non of us had given any negative feedback. I was slightly disappointed that my first ever Facebook app was disabled, but was glad that I have learnt to develop Facebook apps and that I can make several more. However, one question was not answered, who gave the negative feedback?. Turns out that it was me. When developing the app, I used it several times to test the app, and when i found that there were some error, I would correct again and then try using the app again. Finally, when my app was completely ready, I made it available to the public. I then thought of cleaning up the extra images from my album which my app had generated and put into my album and wall during my testing of the app. I wasn't aware of Facebook's logic of collecting negative feedback. It seems that when an user deletes the post/image published by an app, Facebook considers it as a negative feedback and I had more than 20 of them deleted from my album and Facebook thought people are not liking the app and that they deleting the posts generated by it and thus disabled my app.

New Interests in Horoscope

I had never believed in Horoscopes. I didn't even know that they were based on planet's positions at the time of birth relative to the birth place. But now here I am doing extensive research on that subject. From my younger days, I was a kind of person who won't even read the subjects which I hated especially history and geography. I felt they were useless and that it was a waste of time studying them. I was interested in science as it was useful and the subject was exciting. It was the same with horoscopes when my parents started looking for a match for me. Whenever I felt that a girl could be a good match for me, the horoscopes wouldn't match. Hence, horoscopes were something useless in my view and I never used to show interest in them. So high was my disinterest in horoscope that even my parents had started getting some influence of my disinterest.

But, Now things have changed. For the first time in my life I am so interested in a subject which I feel is useless and I am spending hours studying and researching the subject collecting bits and pieces of scattered information from all over the internet. It may be that I am showing such interest in this subject because it can't be considered useless now as the path which my life is going to take in near future actually depends on the ancient rules and formulas defined in this subject. So vast is the information that many local astrologers won't have a hold on all the rules, formulas and exceptions. So, I have decided find every available information to be able understand these rules and formulas and especially the special exceptions which are very important but less known and used.

Though I don't believe in horoscopes, I do believe in God and feel that God is always there looking after and taking care of me and God will make sure that my wishes and prayers come true.

Pace of Life

About a month back I had put this quote as my face book status: "Life keeps changing so fast that, by the time I start realizing what's happening around me, things change....." . And its continuing to happen, By the time I slowly start understanding and absorbing the changes happening around me, things change and again I take my own time to understand and absorb these changes and yet again, things change. I wonder whether it’s just me or everyone else as well. Can our minds and emotions be agile enough to instantaneously adapt to change? I guess it’s not humanely possible. I think I’ll continue my slow way of absorbing the changes as usual.

On resonance, frequencies and wavelength

According to wikipedia, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate with larger amplitude at some frequencies than at others.

One familiar example is a playground swing, which acts as a pendulum. Pushing a person in a swing in time with the natural interval of the swing (its resonant frequency) will make the swing go higher and higher (maximum amplitude), while attempts to push the swing at a faster or slower tempo will result in smaller arcs.

Which means resonance happens when two waves of same or different wavelength act upon each other in such a way that one wave supports the other to reach the maximum amplitude.

This also applies to human thoughts and feelings. Two people are said to have good wavelength or lambda when their wavelength helps each other to achieve the resonance resulting in larger magnitude of happiness.

Time to set things right

I had thought of writing this post on 20th May, but I couldn't. As I had mentioned in my last blog, some things had gone wrong and had to be set right. So, after the morning meeting with my Chinese counterpart I had a chat with the leader in HQ and told him that my estimation for a certain component has gone wrong and developers are struggling to meet the deadline. He was a good friend my mine when I was in China and he was prompt in calling for a conference with the stakeholders to decide on what can be done. Thankfully in the conference all the concerned stakeholders agreed to drop the requirement which not only saved my ass but also saved the people working on implementing the concerned component. What I have learnt from my six+ years of working with the Chinese is that they appreciate honesty, which some of my Indian colleagues actually aren't are when it comes to reporting to the Chinese. Well, may be thats why they trust me more and like to give me more responsibility.

With power comes responsibility

I was looking back at my career at work where in I had joined as a developer fixing bugs in a reporting system. Just recently, I was assigned the lead architect role for a new product. It had been a long journey with lot of ups and downs. However, little did I realize that some things I do impacts lot many people, not only their careers but also their personal life. Yesterday, I saw a good friend of mine looking very depressed because her work was delayed by two weeks for which I had estimated the effort as one week and she had to miss her dance practice for the annual day. I felt sorry for her deep within my heart as I was very aggressive in my estimation and I talking to her manager also didn't help her situation as the dates have been committed to the dependent products in other departments and her manager told me that he was helpless. In another instance, a colleague of mine was telling me that a good member in his team was denied confirmation because of me. I was wondering that he was a talented person and I had never given any bad feedback about him. Later I remember the talk I had with my leader last day when I chose another member for a specific task for a new product instead of him (the reason was that the other member had already worked in a similar product before), little did I know that this would have created a negative impression about that person in the leader's mind. Guess I need to be more careful on what I do or say as I remember a dialog in one of the spider man movie "With great power comes great responsibility".