Rational Software Conference 2009

It was a busy week because of Rational Software Conference (RSC). RSC happens in multiple cities in India. I was supposed to speak at RSC Hyderabad and RSC Pune, and do a couple of demos in RSC Bangalore and RSC Hyderabad (everything on Rational Insight). Swine flu and some confusion with the schedule resulted in me speaking/demoing at Hyderabad, Bangalore and a client location in Bangalore.

All in all it was a good (and tiring) experience. Rational Insight was received quite well. For some 'Rational Insight was exactly what they needed'. With Insight being built on Cognos, I could answer a lot of questions in affirmative - ' can I see reports in pdf?', 'what about on mobile devices?', 'can i schedule the reports?', 'can I customize the reports?' , 'is it easy to to customize?' etc etc. The Insight data warehouse solves the problem of home grown or third party data sources, something which everyone seemed to have.

PS: I managed to have some Chicken Biryani at Paradise Hotel in Hyderabad as well :) (Ask any Hyderabadi about Biryani and they will send you to Paradise!)

Keeping Wordpress from overwriting .htaccess rules

.htaccess file is a small Apache file that lets you do all sorts of funky things with requests made to your server.

A typical .htaccess file looks like this

# BEGIN wordpress
[ifmodule mod_rewrite.c]
rewriteEngine On
rewriteBase /
rewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
rewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
rewriteRule . /index.php [L]
[/ifmodule]
# END wordpress

Wordpress rewrites the section between '# BEGIN wordpress' and '# END wordpress' from time to time. Hence any custom rules written by you must be written outside this section. Never place your own rules within the ‘wordpress’ block