Thursday, July 31, 2008

pidgin is a better IM

well recently on linux i was using pidgin so i thought i start using it on windows too .. and boy i am more than happy, atleast its good for what it does .. just text .. no video/calls but thats fine, since most of the time in office we use it to communicate via text. 

try it .. its free at http://www.pidgin.im/

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Hadoop ! Breaks records

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/hadoop/2008/07/apache_hadoop_wins_terabyte_sort_benchmark.html

Interesting - http://hadoop.apache.org

Its an excellent software for distributed computing on the lines of map/reduce from goog. Anyways normally we wouldn't need it unless, we need to do analytics or things like indexing TB's of data.

Monday, July 28, 2008

This person works for google !

Really inspirational ... Parents illiterate and doesnt have legs , read this story , an IIT madras grad and now works for Google !

http://specials.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/28sl1.htm

Whats the next ! after web

yes web is innovating and reinnovating itself, whats the next now. I am sure its not mobile as many think, since mobile has been too much over hyped, its just a device, i want to call people thats all, nothing more, nothing less. I guess yes there is this iTablet that would be intersting to see.

Look at the difference, people wanted cellphones to get smaller and smaller sometime back now they want to watch /browse and hence small isnt cool, they would naturally want it big, but then where is the end, how big is big and how small is small. We used to ask how big is your TV and the bigger the better, isnt it .. And innovations were on making TV's bigger and bigger and at the same time there were innovations to make cellphones smaller and smaller :) so everybody has work , the ones who make things smaller and ones who make things bigger - best of both worlds.

But in the end, here is what i think will be real innovations or what i guess i will consider as the next in devices
1. Foldable laptops / Foldable displays.
2. A renewable source of energy that can be used anywhere (like what we see in iron man) , that would really change things.
3. Green revolution - Better recycling techniques, reduction of green house gasses.
4. Of course, lesser dependence on fossil fuels, that will be a power changing equation, since then mid east would be uneasy, as their monopoly would be lost, but useless ideas like corn methanol should be avoided.

What else ? I wish i have another dream ;-)

Aha here comes cuil ?

Well as usual here comes "another" search, just that this has got a lot more publicity due to the perceived capabilities of the creators. I guess this must be interesting, though i am used to the way the standard search engines return results.
www.cuil.com or www.cuill.com

This one returns results in a different way, like a newspaper layout kind of thing. It claims to index a lot of millions of pages, though google doesnt publish anymore about its index size.

I guess thats valid, since index size is no more a valid comparision of strength. Whats important is whether i get what i want. I couldnt atleast find it as useful as google, since most of my results gave me some unpopular sites with lesser information. As such this is certainly not at attempt to build another company but an open book to come and aquire. this is a nice process, like they did before, build a company, show as though you are going to attack the king. The king will buy you, or alteast someone who aspires to be a king. And in the process the creators fill their pockets with billions of dollars.

Is this good ? I mean are people starting ventures to nurture it or sell it ? Atleast i will never trust someone who starts a venture in the hope of being bought by a bigger company, well that might be good for the investors, but is that really an indication of love of their babies , will they do this to their kids, isnt a startup like a kid for the creators ?

As such i hope this doesnt turn out to be another sale story, it would suck then.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

generics in java

generics in java has more to it than whats visible. what happens behind the scenes is really great to understand and know. things like type erasure and reification , pretty interesting. But its one of the most used features now, its there in almost every code that I write (though i had lived without it).

love java

recently i have started doing a lot of c++, and well yes after a long long time, and now i really appreciate how cool java is :) Java is the best language out there, and i guess its the best thing that happened to the computing industry !!! Java is great !!! (Not that i dont like c++) , c++ and Java are the two languages that i like love and appreciate.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

terror attacks on india !

2 serial blasts in 2 cities lots killed and injured .. (in Bangalore and Abhmedabad) .. where has india gone wrong ? I have quite a few muslim friends, and i am sure they are good, somehow it seems a few fundamentalists are misusing religion and trying to instigate instablity.

My question to terrorists
1. Does attacks increase love towards them ? Like yes today there was an attack, i started loving muslims from today .. Is that what they want ?
2. Attacks increase hatred, its simple thing to understand if they have a brain. If they want to reduce hatred, attacks have increased it (was this what they wanted ? )
3. Avenging bad treatment with bombs ! Well interesting, they need to get a life and understand that a lot of love and appreciation comes with helping others. Why dont terrorists open shelters for poor, or donate money, or food etc. That will surely help in building bonds.
4. A lot of muslims should come out openly and condemn it (of course only if they are remorseful), and muslim leaders in india should strongly condemn it. This is really not the right solution and it will only lead to increased hatred ..

thinking of that, actually do the terrorists even know why they are doing it ? or what exactly they want ? if they tell that, atleast they can get what they want, but if their desire is playing with blood, they are surely not going to have a happy time themselves. GIVE RESPECT and TAKE RESPECT, i hope something like this was there in their holy books. Terrorists are enymies of everyone, including muslims.

India is strong and united and no terrorist can change that.

what is google doing - lively sucks and so does knol

Seems they are out of ideas ! That is what happens when "so called intelligent" people think of that as "heaven' , yes free food wow thats great isnt it - as though eating is a good thing.

Anyways here is the point
1. lively is only for windows ! well that sucks .. anyways when i tried, i would say second life is million times better , why clone second life ? Google is trying to drive other companies out of business, by bringing bad products, but they do sell, due to the brand name, anyways they are hurting their brand name.
2. I dont use lively now, but i dont use second life too :) , after all these are things which someone who has a lot of time to waste would do. Already social networking seems to be a burden ( i mean text one), why would i spend my life in virtual world, we need to get a life and visit places and not be in virtual world ! Later sell virtual gym too !
3. Yes it would be like Orkut, thats losing its shine and a low performer, so would google news.
4. I wonder people are taking social networking to too much extent, they are just adding to internet traffic. Who has time, i wonder !!!
5. Knol !!! well another great useless product, wasnt wikipedia great ? I dont know why another clone of Wikipedia, and that too a bad one ? Intelligent, they masked it in knol.google.com so that alexa cannot tell the traffic, though lively shows traffic improving and then dropping, people are attracted to it due to the fact that its goog, but unless the product is good, and innovative it will fizz out, there is nothing innovative in this.

Google, is a search engine provider, and they should stick to that, there are lot of things in search that still needs to be solved, and all these seem to be more or less ways of trying to earn more money with ads.

I hate facebook too, its again a huge waste of time, i would say linkedin is the best , they could add more features, like scraps etc, but as such it serves the purpose , being connected. everything else can be done through mails.

True good ones are like twitter, myspace, linkedin, ebay and amazon, google search, ask news according to what i feel.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Deal or No Deal is TOTAL CRAP

This is one game show, thats just nothing more than crap, actually crap also might be better.
This is the only show where you dont have anything to do, and still you are asked to think carefully on which box to choose, well isnt that funny ? Whats there to think hard and choose carefully ! Anyways the worst show , i wanted to write this for long, though i stopped seeing it long time back ..

poor twitter struggling !!!!


Here is what i see ... I guess twitter should have started using Java instead of Ruby on Rails ;-) anyways i know thats not to blame for :) but they are now doing the right things, but their messaging infrastructure seems to be really overburdened.

Here is what i see .... though it was temporary - I mean i couldnt see it later, so i thought i will capture it - >

multiply.com interesting ...

Well recently i opened an account on multiply.com , yes thats the site thats now accusing facebook of copying and facebook is busy accusing others of copying :) interesting.

Anyways this site is like one in all, everything from photos to videos to blog to calendar and yes to social networking .. everything is there , i liked it and i am sure anyways i was never a facebook fan, i would like to see it more.. It also gives option to import blog ;-) from blogger too .. so here you go .. maybe i would import it there .

my vote now goes to multiply.com - down down facebook, which is somewhat like a ms slave (well or the other way ! not sure).

Monday, July 21, 2008

orkut hacked

now orkut is down ..
someone seems to have updated my profile, with everything in brazilian and my location is brazilian .. seems a lot of others had the same problem, though i didnt click anything , it just happened behind the scenes. anyways, soon i modified it back, but within 10 mins the site was down .. whether it was brought down or it came down due to the attack, not sure. ...

Rubified

Finally over the weekend , i learnt Ruby and also Rails ;-) so now it would an interesting challenge to find someone who wants me to work on that ;-) yes ! i just found one .. otherwise i will have to create a project for myself.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

wiki style blog

Am on the lookout for a wiki style blog, since somehow i feel blogger is limited. Wiki style blogs like confluence etc have changed the way in which corporates share documents/knowledge. Its like knowledge management used to be an additional activity of a company, now knowledge management is a by product of what you do.

Isnt that fun ? Lets say you write design document in word. Here you will have to worry about sharing, versioning, tracking comments and finally releasing it and maintaining it, its a bigger challenge if there are 2-3 contributors. Also if others want to see, you will have to mail it to them or share it in a file server (where its usually an obscure file path), and people need to be told where the document is and there are times you might re-write something thats already there. Wheras in a wiki style, you actually work with the presumption that document is always shared and formatting is not propretiory but globally agreed upon wiki style. Here versioning, sharing, writing and searching is more intutive and well defined, and its easy to implement corporate style conventions. Also its easy for others to peek into what other projects are doing and see if they can contribute. It increase communication across teams.

I guess it can be implemented in all companies, and its the new wave of collaboration. I guess its been 8 months since i used word :) and i love wiki style documentation.

Check out confluence at http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ , its commerical though.
and also mediawiki, that powers wikipedia, it can be used to power any corporate intranet wiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki and its free.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

lively ?

Well why copy second life now ? Anyways i still like second life, that has a linux viewer too ... second life is the best ... i guess google should stop trying to enter other spaces and kill others ..

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Gmail - Memory killer

I have observed this quite often. In a quest to provide everything through javascript for better "speed", i think gmail does a lot of caching. So whenever i open gmail i guess i get a 50K memory jump (delta), and usually even if i close the site (tab) in either firefox or IE, the memory doesnt go down. So gmail is actually killing my browser :-(

Friday, July 4, 2008

Quota system is going to kill india ...

India now has >50% quota for (SC. ST. OBC.) well that means atleast in US they should certainly check if there is someone coming from india .. if they are any of those they shouldnt be allowed, since soon they will accumulate in US and then again they will fight for quota ..
well what is this quota after all, is it an indication that they are not intelligent ? Well certainly not , if they are not intelligent, then they would need quota all through their life .. right from school to promotions .. They are more like parasites. I would say lots of people in higher "castes" too are not intelligent .. I would say if there needs to be sincere effort in growth of a country we should have quota based on intelligence.

1. See the entrance rank.
2. If there are 200 seats, give 100 to first 100 and last 100, that would take care of both the ends of world .. no need to be creamy layer etc ... just this criteria (of course leaving blank sheets etc will be disqualification) , if there is a sincere effort to write and still you score the lowest and then your education history justifies the pattern, you are in.

Isnt this simpler ?

I guess its the volume, we have so many SC ST and OBC and they are the ones who vote, so politicians need to make them happy but 50% quota is CRAZY !!!! God save india .. Its a good motivation but its not the right thing, we need to work hard to succeed and there is no shortcut. You cannot live your life relying on quotas ...