My message to friends:
2008 is history, 2009 is mystery, a new year is on the prowl, celebrate carefully.
Manu replies:
You said it. Law is being passed to not arrest criminals. Year on prowl is right.
Shubho da:
Cannot be careful now, busy with destroying evils of 2008, welcoming goods of 2009. Happy..... new year.
Yogesh Rautela:
Thanks soumitra, wish you same, may ll your endeavours turn to fruitful results this year. I personally respect you and a lot and felt lucky to get a chance to work with you. Have learnt so many things from you. Thank you.
Shubho da (again):
For 2009 I wish you 12 Months Safety, 52 Weeks Fun, 365 Days Success, 8760 Hours Good Health, 52600 Minutes Good Luck, 3153600 Seconds Happiness! HAPPY NEW YEAR IN ADVANCE!
Soujit Ghosh:
May every moment of your life bring unlimited joy and happiness to you nd your family for forever.
Titas:
Lets celebrate the coming year, which brings with it fresh air of youth of life, fillng us with renewed joy and vigour.
Aurobindo Nanda:
Wish you a very happy and properous year 2009. May you have a happy, content and blissful experience all throughout.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Monday, December 22, 2008
Three Mistakes Of My Life
I was on page 70 of this novel by Chetan Bhagat when I realized that the Indian Govt. did not really handle Ram Mandir issue in a secular manner. Being a secular country the best that could have happened was for the government to declar "building of a mandir and a masjid on the same site for the sake of its people". If you are wondering how that is possible do visit places like Narayan Hrudayalaya in Bangalore.
Monday, July 7, 2008
It is a small world!
Weird thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago. We were returning from regular weekendly Whitefield trip when we sat down for lunch in the Outpost. Across our table was Bhargav, quietly eating his lunch. I felt very ashamed, but could not hide. Soon he caught my eyes, waved at me, and came over to talk. It could have been quite embarrassing, since I had rejected him in a weekend interview months ago. To my relief he landed a very well paying job elsewhere, and was happy with the onsite opportunity the new job came with. He still remembered me from the interview because of the simple questions in Java that he could not answer and had to read up later on. He knew the answers now, but I insisted that he should enjoy his lunch rather than discussing java.
My son took instant liking for him, partly because he gave a false name, Shah Rukh Khan. So when Bhargav took my business card and disappeared, Soumik was quite shattered :-(
The whole episode was queer. Bhargav even inquired about outcome of his interview with me. I had to tell him that he would not have been a fit there. Hopefully he understood. First time in my life such a thing happened where an interviewee came over to talk to the interviewer after not being selected!
My son took instant liking for him, partly because he gave a false name, Shah Rukh Khan. So when Bhargav took my business card and disappeared, Soumik was quite shattered :-(
The whole episode was queer. Bhargav even inquired about outcome of his interview with me. I had to tell him that he would not have been a fit there. Hopefully he understood. First time in my life such a thing happened where an interviewee came over to talk to the interviewer after not being selected!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Web 2.0 by IASA
IASA Bangalore chapter had its first event yesterday after the launch in Jan, 07. As Krupa pointed out, it took a while to come to Jayanagar from Leela Palace, thanks to the Bangalore traffic. It appears that the Hyderabad chapter is making more progress and we, in Bangalore, need to catch up.
Overall it was a very good seminar. I took this opportunity to register for associate membership with IASA. Hope Symphony will pay for this :-) . It had a packed schedule, with good coverage of topics [http://www.iasahome.org/web/india/chapters/bangalore]. It was an eye opener of sorts, an awareness about Web 2.0 that I overlooked so far. I am so glad I attended this.
So I promised myself that I shall write about my "take home" from this event.
Krupa delivered the introductory speach, pointing out that Time magazine's person of the year for 2006 is You, as in the users of the web, who are transforming the web (basically web 2.0!).
First session was taken by Udayan Banerjee from NIIT. He started slow, but picked up beautifully. He had the important task of clearing the doubts about what is Web2.0. Basically it is a buzzword coined in to address certain phenomena happening in the web starting from 2004. It is not a set of technologies (like AJAX), neither is it a versioning system for the web. His emphasis was on collective intelligence and that order emerges from chaos. For example, the couple of "unconferences" he attended in Chennai! The way unconferences work is if you have an idea that you want to discuss then you publish it in a wiki. Then others can volunteer to join for the discussion. A date and place is fixed. People take up responsibilities to make necessary arrangements. On the day of the conference people would go to a whiteboard and post their names against the time slots available, to make up a schedule and agenda on the fly. He pointed out to the way things are changing in the business world also. Instead of focusing on the best practices (which are proven and can be repeated) businesses are stressing more on Innovation. SDLC's are becoming more lightweight and agile. Applications are spanning multiple devices and technologies, making it more challenging for the architects.
Apparently he likes wikipedia a lot (who does not!). I took his advice and registered in wikipedia. May be sometime soon I shall get to edit stuff in there. I told Sekhar about this. He complained that wikipedia sensored a lot of stuff (pictures of his hometown, I suspect) that he posted :-)
Somebody asked about the quality of open source work. But then Linux is open source! There was some confusion on the economics of open source and Web 2.0 in general, leading to us conclude that people at our economic level have spare time to invest in such (social networking) kind of activitites.
Next in line was Akhil from IBM. Most of his talk was about SecondLife, or virtual reality in general. The demo was very impressive. I knew I registered there a week or so ago, but did not get online yet. He clarified a few points about SecondLife, like the pseudo currency (Linden Dollar) and the economic model and digital rights (whatever digital you create here you get the right to it, and then you can sell it to others to earn Linden Dollar). SecondLife really picked up from end of the last year. The user base is increasing at a staggering rate (a million users being added each month). He thinks this will be the life in future, and I believe him. For me it was like a page from Snow Crash, and I loved it. And then he pointed out some applications of Second Life, like visiting the Forbidden City even without being in China. I decided to create my own Avatar.
After this we had Dr. Srinivas from Infosys talking about Web 2.0 complementing BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA. I thought he wasted a lot of time to convince us that BPM and SOA go hand in hand. I was a little confused about the message. I think it was that Web 2.0 technologies (like AJAX) makes it easier to integrate content from various services to successfully model a business process. One such example was housingmaps.com, which uses craiglist and google maps to create this application. Another one pipes.yahoo.com, which does content aggregation/ mashup. [Here my thoughts went in a tangent, and I was thinking whether there will be a Mobile Web 2.0 as well] He also emphasised on collective intelligence and Software Engineering 2.0, where enterprises encourage the use of blogs and wiki to create reusable reference model (increases the domain knowledge).
We had a break here (high tea), though the break was short, since we were running late.
Vivek was here (he flew in from Delhi for the talk) presenting the Microsoft's view on Software As A Service (though he gave a certain twist to it by naming his presentation Software Plus Service). He showcased few Web 2.0 applications. Amazing stuff. You got to see the website of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which was done using Silverlight technology, with very short time to market and low cost (relatively). The website is very cool, though I doubt whether it has a lot of content (most movie sites do not have too much content anyway). It took four developers (including him as an architect) around ten days to get this up and running. Anothe case study was BP's new Hurricane Management System, which made use of Microsoft's Virtual Earth, internet weather service, ADO.NET, Sharepoint Portal Server and IDV Solution's (a partner) Visual Fusion Suite. It was possible becuase of AJAX. And this is the power of Web 2.0 applications (creating applications on the fly from reusable services). [http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201427]
He also talked about cloud based relays (apparently Indian Railways use this techonology, for example, to cancel each segment of a journey when a ticket is canceled) and Internet Based Authentication (I think he was referring to Windows Live, but I do see google also having similar inclination; google sites now allow users to use any email id and authenticate with that; actually internet authentication is based on email now... very strange, and totally unsecure... I recall an article I read about reducing spam mail... email based authentication actually defeats that purpose).
While on flight he met a student whose project was to track a domestic airlines flight in the web. Pretty innovative, huh?
Vivek also had a slide on the emerging patterns of SaaS:
1. Facade (so that the client of a service does not know where it is coming from)
2. Select (don't know)
3. Composite (obvious)
4. Mashup (should have seen it coming)
I also have to update myself about "Attached Services" when the slide deck gets published :-)
Last session (before the open house) was taken by Swarraj from Cognizant (he also flew in, from Pune). It was on User Experience in Web 2.0 world. I have a UI development background myself (front end developer since the beginning of my career ten years ago). His presentation is best understood by the examples he gave. I was fondly reminded of pageflakes, which came up in a meeting room in Santa Clara office while we were discussing layout and positioning issues. Some of the websites are pageflakes, igoogle, fundooweb, flickr, pixxy, riya, del.icio.us. He mentioned that flickr has become so popular that yahoo is shutting down their homegrown image sharing service. Which reminds me, I have to migrate my yahoo images to flickr.
He gave us a new buzzword, WOA. I am not going to tell you guys what it is though (at least something I should keep for myself, huh?).
I noticed that he pronounced Skype as Sky-pay. I was trying to find out the actual pronunciation ever since.
The open house was good, but I was getting late, so got off in the middle of it. One of the persons from back raise the question of opening up the browser. I know it is a pet topic of all front end developers. I think the answer is still open. W3C should come up with a proposal on this.
So long. I have spent almost one and half hours on this, and my hands are aching.
Overall it was a very good seminar. I took this opportunity to register for associate membership with IASA. Hope Symphony will pay for this :-) . It had a packed schedule, with good coverage of topics [http://www.iasahome.org/web/india/chapters/bangalore]. It was an eye opener of sorts, an awareness about Web 2.0 that I overlooked so far. I am so glad I attended this.
So I promised myself that I shall write about my "take home" from this event.
Krupa delivered the introductory speach, pointing out that Time magazine's person of the year for 2006 is You, as in the users of the web, who are transforming the web (basically web 2.0!).
First session was taken by Udayan Banerjee from NIIT. He started slow, but picked up beautifully. He had the important task of clearing the doubts about what is Web2.0. Basically it is a buzzword coined in to address certain phenomena happening in the web starting from 2004. It is not a set of technologies (like AJAX), neither is it a versioning system for the web. His emphasis was on collective intelligence and that order emerges from chaos. For example, the couple of "unconferences" he attended in Chennai! The way unconferences work is if you have an idea that you want to discuss then you publish it in a wiki. Then others can volunteer to join for the discussion. A date and place is fixed. People take up responsibilities to make necessary arrangements. On the day of the conference people would go to a whiteboard and post their names against the time slots available, to make up a schedule and agenda on the fly. He pointed out to the way things are changing in the business world also. Instead of focusing on the best practices (which are proven and can be repeated) businesses are stressing more on Innovation. SDLC's are becoming more lightweight and agile. Applications are spanning multiple devices and technologies, making it more challenging for the architects.
Apparently he likes wikipedia a lot (who does not!). I took his advice and registered in wikipedia. May be sometime soon I shall get to edit stuff in there. I told Sekhar about this. He complained that wikipedia sensored a lot of stuff (pictures of his hometown, I suspect) that he posted :-)
Somebody asked about the quality of open source work. But then Linux is open source! There was some confusion on the economics of open source and Web 2.0 in general, leading to us conclude that people at our economic level have spare time to invest in such (social networking) kind of activitites.
Next in line was Akhil from IBM. Most of his talk was about SecondLife, or virtual reality in general. The demo was very impressive. I knew I registered there a week or so ago, but did not get online yet. He clarified a few points about SecondLife, like the pseudo currency (Linden Dollar) and the economic model and digital rights (whatever digital you create here you get the right to it, and then you can sell it to others to earn Linden Dollar). SecondLife really picked up from end of the last year. The user base is increasing at a staggering rate (a million users being added each month). He thinks this will be the life in future, and I believe him. For me it was like a page from Snow Crash, and I loved it. And then he pointed out some applications of Second Life, like visiting the Forbidden City even without being in China. I decided to create my own Avatar.
After this we had Dr. Srinivas from Infosys talking about Web 2.0 complementing BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA. I thought he wasted a lot of time to convince us that BPM and SOA go hand in hand. I was a little confused about the message. I think it was that Web 2.0 technologies (like AJAX) makes it easier to integrate content from various services to successfully model a business process. One such example was housingmaps.com, which uses craiglist and google maps to create this application. Another one pipes.yahoo.com, which does content aggregation/ mashup. [Here my thoughts went in a tangent, and I was thinking whether there will be a Mobile Web 2.0 as well] He also emphasised on collective intelligence and Software Engineering 2.0, where enterprises encourage the use of blogs and wiki to create reusable reference model (increases the domain knowledge).
We had a break here (high tea), though the break was short, since we were running late.
Vivek was here (he flew in from Delhi for the talk) presenting the Microsoft's view on Software As A Service (though he gave a certain twist to it by naming his presentation Software Plus Service). He showcased few Web 2.0 applications. Amazing stuff. You got to see the website of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, which was done using Silverlight technology, with very short time to market and low cost (relatively). The website is very cool, though I doubt whether it has a lot of content (most movie sites do not have too much content anyway). It took four developers (including him as an architect) around ten days to get this up and running. Anothe case study was BP's new Hurricane Management System, which made use of Microsoft's Virtual Earth, internet weather service, ADO.NET, Sharepoint Portal Server and IDV Solution's (a partner) Visual Fusion Suite. It was possible becuase of AJAX. And this is the power of Web 2.0 applications (creating applications on the fly from reusable services). [http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201427]
He also talked about cloud based relays (apparently Indian Railways use this techonology, for example, to cancel each segment of a journey when a ticket is canceled) and Internet Based Authentication (I think he was referring to Windows Live, but I do see google also having similar inclination; google sites now allow users to use any email id and authenticate with that; actually internet authentication is based on email now... very strange, and totally unsecure... I recall an article I read about reducing spam mail... email based authentication actually defeats that purpose).
While on flight he met a student whose project was to track a domestic airlines flight in the web. Pretty innovative, huh?
Vivek also had a slide on the emerging patterns of SaaS:
1. Facade (so that the client of a service does not know where it is coming from)
2. Select (don't know)
3. Composite (obvious)
4. Mashup (should have seen it coming)
I also have to update myself about "Attached Services" when the slide deck gets published :-)
Last session (before the open house) was taken by Swarraj from Cognizant (he also flew in, from Pune). It was on User Experience in Web 2.0 world. I have a UI development background myself (front end developer since the beginning of my career ten years ago). His presentation is best understood by the examples he gave. I was fondly reminded of pageflakes, which came up in a meeting room in Santa Clara office while we were discussing layout and positioning issues. Some of the websites are pageflakes, igoogle, fundooweb, flickr, pixxy, riya, del.icio.us. He mentioned that flickr has become so popular that yahoo is shutting down their homegrown image sharing service. Which reminds me, I have to migrate my yahoo images to flickr.
He gave us a new buzzword, WOA. I am not going to tell you guys what it is though (at least something I should keep for myself, huh?).
I noticed that he pronounced Skype as Sky-pay. I was trying to find out the actual pronunciation ever since.
The open house was good, but I was getting late, so got off in the middle of it. One of the persons from back raise the question of opening up the browser. I know it is a pet topic of all front end developers. I think the answer is still open. W3C should come up with a proposal on this.
So long. I have spent almost one and half hours on this, and my hands are aching.
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