I like to Blog it, Blog it, Blog IT .....

Engineering vs Development

2008-03-16T09:33:00.002-05:00

When I was offered a job around a year back in Engineering, I was told that the work, life would be totally different given that I came from a product development team..I acknowledged the difference, the keyword being acknowledge, but at that time, I really didn't see a "BIG" difference....after all, no matter what you do in a software company, ultimately you are going to deal with bytes. So, I took up that job (in Domain Engineering, more into developing Enterprise resuable software, guiding teams etc) and was very happy with what I did. My days seemed relaxed, productive and had a rhythm to them. I was working hard, but wasn't getting worked up...then came this call for help ~~~~

A Enterprise Infrastructure team undergoing a tough rigmarole, bleeding people profusely sought somebody with my expertise...I thought, thought and thought as I was working for a great team (good upper mgmt always helps!!) and also liked what I was working on. Finally, I gave in to the Einsteinian principle "In adversity, lies opportunity" and took the plunge...Life has been so different eversince.

So many differences!! Focus on delivery rather than technology, focus on practices than technology, focus on people than technology, focus on relationship management than technology, focus on standards than technology, focus on team building than technology and not to miss, the PAGER :P...all this all the bit more because I am in a Enterprise Infrastructure team and have to deal with a lot of other teams and we are in the midst of a mammoth migration effort, migration but more like re-development as there is almost nothing common between the past and present platforms! Life has been so different, very challenging...rhythm gone and sleep has divorced me...have enjoyed a few blissful moments that seem to compensate for the pensive ones and I hope there will be many more post-app migration. I am still hanging in there with all my might and I thank life for all the things it's teaching me :)

So, when you are offered a job in Engineering and people tell you it is different, think about it seriously. I am not choosing one over the other, just saying that they are vastly DIFFERENT!!

One click calling~

2008-02-23T10:18:00.000-06:00

Grand Idea! Atleast for small businesses! Enroll into Google's grand central from blogger.com/home and have the liberty of people calling you from a web page without exposing your number! You can have all calls forwarded to a voicemail if you would like, block callers, listen to voicemail as it is being recorded and more! A real boon for businesses on the web and a lot of flexibility for people on the run (you can have a fixed number that can forward calls to home, cell, work or any other number ;P)...and all this from the Google stable!! that's why they say "paisa talks"...(Google acquired GrandCentral for a decent sum :P)

MiHoo!

2008-02-02T10:24:00.000-06:00

Had to say my 2 cents on the most beaten down topic on the internet, atleast by now! Every blog has it, so should mine be different? Well, since I am writing this, you know my decision!

So, is this hostile Yahoo! takeover move by Microsoft Good, Bad or Ugly? Not Ugly for sure given that Yahoo with all the eyeballs cannot make money and Microsoft with all the money cannot get eyeballs! No matter what they do, no matter how much they try in their own respective ways! So, Microsoft comes up with this ingenious idea of acquiring Yahoo...if you can't create, conquer and that's what they are doing and have always did although this one time it all makes sense to me :)...a creative Yahoo with all the money and management power from Microsoft might actually really challenge Google (given that a Microsoftish Yahoo still has it's own heart and legs)...Creativity doesn't bloom under pressure which Yahoo has been under lately. Yahoo and Microsoft might just bring in the best of their worlds and become a formidable competitor to Google! Weird, Google is considered a monster these days. Microsoft must really be happy and jealous about it ...

If things don't work out great, it will just be another game of PacMan/GobMan (so many versions available) where PacMan gobbles one of those special pills on the board and reverses direction, chasing the chasers, but just for a little while till the chasers regain composure..Yahoo can be that special pill that only works for a little while for Microsoft...Time will telll !!!

Predict the future?

2008-01-13T16:53:00.000-06:00

Can anybody predict anything else apart from recession that is bound to hit us sooner than later? I think we are heading very very soon given that Mr.Bernanke sees no option but to reduce interest rates spiraling more inflation, driving more bankruptcies, more cuts, more inflation and less growth!! What else is this?

Anyways, I had not started this to talk about the recession that we are going to see or the recession we already see....I am trying to see what the next most popular thing would be? Google built an empire on AdSense and AdWords and a very successful one and it has changed lives to a great extent! It has also burgeoned a lot of startups one way or the other, by search, apis or atleast in spirit...if Google can make it this big, than I can do too spirit! But what will the next thing for Search be? More Search? But Where? How about a GPS? GPS's have been available for a long long time but haven't been within reach for a number of people, including moi...but this Thanksgiving all that changed...GPS's were the hottest thing on the market...prices were slashed and these devices were embraced with open hands!! Touch screen tour/city guides for just a little over $100 bucks to start with was a big temptation that many couldn't stay away from....

Given that these devices are not simple to construct, a $100+ tag doesn't do them much justice...there are other ways to make money....you can imitate the Game Console business and sell units for cheap while selling games/maps at a high price (will become a cash cow as people update devices with new maps, routes etc) OR
How about making money on Search? I know there are POI (Points of Interest) in a GPS, but how many can you have in a car? Put Wireless Internet, Search on a GPS device and POI's are boundless and avenues for earning money equally endless and I think that's what will happen...Voice Activated search/voice commands for a GPS device tied with search and wireless internet.....I can see Google doing it or the next google doing it :)...But well who cares for what I think :D...

Disruptive Innovations

2008-01-13T16:32:00.001-06:00

A new Nano entered this world...a nano that can move on it's own feet...well, can sing a song too but only if upgraded...for better or for worse, there is something very different out there and the aims are quite big ... Aims to change this world for a majority are always big!

If you lived in India, you would know this...Owning a 4-wheeler is one of life's biggest dreams, as big as owning a house for some...I know how excited I was when we owned our first car, a second-hand light blue colored Fiat...we were so proud of it! Tata has done the incredible, released a sweet looking car for around $2500 dollars...maybe we should get the price in rupees...dollar is just so flaky...Well, it is priced at Rs. 1,00,000, well within reach of half of India's population...if not easy, it is definitely affordable...I am sure other third-world countries are equally happy/cautious about it....

Called this a disruptive innovation, because it shrunk the dream cycle of millions of people...and it is not a cheap looking car! The cheapest car here in the US is somewhere in the $10,000s .... Although I love the look of the car, the very fact that it will be a very common sight on our roads in India is a scary thought...It's not been a long time since I visited India last and I still recall the soot I inhaled even when traveling in car...things have changed and they have changed a lot out there...lots of development, lots of cars and very little room....this new car will only make life impossible out there...maybe it is time to enforce some Chinese vehicular policies in India to cut the congestion....odd numbered number plates travel on a particular day of the week and even numbered on the other days...(fosters car pooling) and many more in the same direction.....
Tata has really made India proud and will make a lot of Indians proud very soon :)...The smile that I had 20 years back will soon be on so many faces....how very wonderful :)

Baaaaaaaaaccccckkkkk Aggainn

2008-01-12T10:11:00.000-06:00

Finally :)!! Can blame a lot of things, but that would be finding reasons for my faults and I don't want to do it :)

Isn't it easy to just pass the blame and let the next one worry about it? It is!, but it is also an addictive chain. It becomes a loop with cyclic dependencies or it ends up pointing to "Spiderman" being at fault because he didn't rescue us from this. Is this an uncommon sight to see? Not exactly ... think about Office Politics? Isn't it rampant there? Think about a problem and the reason why one couldn't do it.....It will always end up in one of the cases mentioned earlier...A workplace should be a self-correcting system..not a self-destructing system...Office politics can really act as a catalyst for self-destruction...

So, what's a catalyst for self-correction? Good team dynamics, excellent management, what else? Can you find any of these :)....Well, maybe it is easier to spot Spiderman!!!!

It's been a while

2007-11-18T21:03:00.000-06:00

Can't believe it's been months since I blogged! I was in good rhythm during the early part of this year and things faded eventually...No matter how I chase time, I can never catch enough of it...any strategies on how I can do better? I guess better scheduling and gallons of Starbucks would be one answer !!

During my prolonged disappearance, I had some pleasant encounters with OpenSource...have been involved with extending it and contributing to the community (more specifically ServiceMix and JMeter) and have been active trying to manage my finances (after I tried that, I have a lot more work to do!! Agile, anybody?)...have been lauding TDD, Eclipse with its endless set of features and my wife in her endless endeavors on finding the right job.

This post is to "poke" myself (*facebook*) so that I can realize that there is life beyond the 4 imaginary walls or that these imaginary walls are just that, pure imagination!! Being imaginative is not that good always :P..Anyways, have to get back to my walls now!

My wife suddenly says it would be good to write a book...now I think, "Yeah, wouldn't it?"...how about one on Servicemix? Hope I can bring that beyond my imaginations! One day I shall, I must and I will write a book!

Mother of all mashups

2007-07-13T21:28:00.000-05:00

Welll...maybe not, but surely excellent! Google has done it again. Enabled the right thing at the right place!! Out in the world is "Google Mapplets", a mashup of map based mashups and enabled right alongside google maps, in an unobstrusive way (as always)....there but not there types, invisibly visible.

Google opened up Maps a couple of years back (maybe even less than that) and a lot of interesting and innovative mashups that use this come up every other day .. Eg:- HousingMaps.com, ChicagoCrime.org, GasBuddy.com..Many of these innovative creations haven't been exploited the way they should have been/could've been because of one very obvious reason...They are very useful, but just not popular! Some are quite popular, but a little/lot more popularity won't hurt them :)..Google Mapplets is an excellent way of getting this information to a user's fingertips...

So what are these Mapplets? In Google's words:

Mapplets are mini-webpages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-webpage that you can put into a normal webpage, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.

Google has once again shown us the difference between a good product and a great product...good products are conceptually good, have a lot of potential, show a twist in thought...but great products are all that and add twist to life ... You don't have to think about the most innovative product in this world...to enable access at the right places to innovative creations is by itself quite innovative..

Check out Mapplets for more information..

Blades, Virtualization, VMWare

2007-07-10T07:38:00.000-05:00

Virtualization is one very common term floating around Corporate IT circles. It means different for different people and no matter what it means, everybody agrees on one thing, which is basically that it is a means of cost-savings. People consider virtualization to be server consolidation, hosting your company's services on Amazon etc etc, but to me ..

Virtualization is about creating a virtual, rather than actual, version of a computing environment. Virtualization is useful for consolidation because one physical server can host several virtual versions of an operating system/systems or applications.
Virtualization is a good option for IT shops with several servers that are running applications that do not use up much of the capacity in the box Eg: VMware and Microsoft platforms in the virtual data center...Remember all those systems in Certification, Integration that "hardly" hum and remember that testing you couldn't do because you didn't have a server with the environment you needed to test it on? Virtualization can be the silver bullet for you! You can use the idle capacity of your boxes to launch different OS's basically making one machine assume different characteristics based on the need! Simulating a heterogeneous test environment for product platforms becomes a cakewalk...product demos to customers on multifarious platforms by Marketing becomes easy...have various VMware instances (each instance is only a file :)) and pick and choose as per customer demand..one laptop, no partition!
Infact, what I would ideally like to see is Product vendors coming out with pre-configured VMWare versions for products on platforms they support. A solid example on how this would be useful is from my own experience...We have a major memory leak going on for one of our application in Production running on a Linux Opteron server...we have been evaluating java profiling tools and have almost decided on JProbe and we thought that it would be a great fit for our needs currently...BUT now after talks with JProbe, we realise that don't have a version of their product for Linux,Opteron...Would have been good if they had a VMWare packaged version of their product in a friendly platform...we would have grabbed it with open hands...Java is java anywhere .. on Opteron, Sparc whatever...so just being able to run JProbe on our machine was more important to us!

Talked a lot about cost savings by flexibility, grouping above...there are other advantages too...especially when combined with blade servers, the cost savings can be enormous...less space occupied, easier maintenance, savings in power costs, flexibility, easier configuration, faster response to needs and more! In fact, there are claims from companies saying that they saved around 70% or more in datacenter costs...not a very easy number to achieve, but nevertheless i think you can save quite a bit if you use it the RIGHT way!!

Though in Corporate circles I should say, Might is RIGHT :P///Right ?

Java - made for Real time?

2007-07-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

Java is a great language. Made to run anywhere, it started running everywhere, captured a million developer hearts and then bloomed to perfection. Well, almost ... It has the largest developer base now, is a part almost of all open source initiatives, has grown leaps and bounds above any Microsoftian language/platform, but still lacks in ----

One of the strongest points and the weakest chinks about Java has been it's automatic Garbage Collection. It is really very convenient to have a self-contained application (in terms of memory usage and security) and get over the rigmarole of code-based memory management, but everything that comes easy has a cost attached to it. Java's cost is it's unpredictability at times... times when GC takes over and strangles your app, sometimes to an extent of choking it to death (mean OutOfMemory exceptions :)). My move to CTO brought me closer to applications, mainly applications with problems and one such association brought me to an application that just died every 10 hours. Closer analysis revealed that GC's were very frequent and almost all of them were full GC's. We are tuning the GC parameters to make the app perform optimally, but some other thoughts started sprouting in my head...

What if there was a way we could take control over GC and schedule it around better times...most GC's always happened during peak hours...many app's can take this delay (well, if it is in the order of <5 sec), but some mission critical systems just cannot..say for example missile launching systems/ time critical financial systems where every second is just too precious...with bigger heaps, GC takes longer -- maybe in the order of minutes at times and this might be unbearable to quite a few "lenient" systems too..after all, all our applications are driven by SLA's from our customers that specifically measure delivery times and accuracy. Can we afford to let our JVM's run scot free when we are SLA bound? A time-based GC strategy I thought made some sense when such mission critical systems were in question..why not run GC like our nightly batch processes when customers are hardly online? This would mean that during peak hours, our JVM works uninterrupted and during the nights, it just unloads...well, made some sense to me (not a lot :)) as this would make Java behave more "predictably"..but on the flip side is the enormous memory chunk that one would have to allocate to keep our JVM whirring...doesn't make practical sense and maybe that's why SUN didn't have anything like that to offer....my thoughts I thought were in the right direction though and I talked to my colleague Ryan about this and he pointed me to a silver bullet :)

Running a JVM with "deterministic latency"...namely setting some stiff targets to a JVM and make it operate within it..SUN had been worrying about this problem from day 1...JSR 001 was all about this, but the implementation really did take quite a bit of time..SUN came up with the RTSJ spec this May (Real Time Specification for Java) that addresses this concern.

You can find the spec here RealTime Spec for Java

This is a good article for the same...O'Reilly RTSJ

Real-time Java offers a much more reliable and predictable scheduling mechanism, memory handling methods, different memory models, a more predictable threading and synchronization model, asynchronous event handling, and high-resolution time handling. It makes predictable execution the first priority in all trade-off decisions, sometimes at the expense of typical general-purpose computing performance measures. It achieves predictability by having RealTimeThreads that have higher priority over GC threads, by direct memory access i.e by allocating objects on memory that isn't in the heap (so that the app remains unaffected even during collections) and many more features...Read the spec and the article to learn more !!!
Did Java fix the last chink in it's armour? Well, there is still the Swing bloat problem :)....Developers are never a satisfied bunch!!

Under the radar

2007-06-24T08:45:00.000-05:00

Google's dominance in this e-world has become insurmountable, so much so that mergers and acquisitions that weren't dreamt about earlier are being talked about now..and all this to put up a semblance of resistance against the big giant.
Rumours about a possible Yahoo takeover by Microsoft, Yahoo offering about 30% of its stock to take up Myspace (totally illogical!) and now stronger rumours about Yahoo and eBay merging (this merger makes a lot of sense with all the "synergies" they can bring in together) have all been going around. All this to stop Google from occupying our minds, our hearts, our breath and maybe even our death :)..Imagine Google keeping details about you, various stages in your life, your death, your grave and playing it in a video? Possible?

Coming to which reminds me of the dinosaur...there was no living being capable of challenging it in a fight..What finally undid it was it's sheer size. Size does matter!
Google's big size has given it visibility and many others anxious goosebumps. Our friendly neighbourhood search engine now seems more like a monster chewing on all our private data now. There are so many privacy allegations against it now that I have lost count. Issues with Belgian authors, problems with Gmail, current Street view privacy encroachments and a European embargo against not retaining data for more than 18 months are a few I can think of..oops, i forgot YouTube!...Was all this not there b4, I feel it was...what's bringing it out now is the fear that if we let Google grow, it might become that 'evil' uncontrollable monster. Privacy is undoubtedly an issue of concern, but it is being blown out of proportion with respect to Google. All this because of it's growing size? Will Google's growth be it's worst enemy?

Patronize Patternize

2007-06-16T09:53:00.000-05:00

Patterns, Patterns, Patterns -- that's what I have been doing the last couple of days...This was in preparation to a "OO Design Pattern" test that my organization wanted me to take when I moved to a new position. Being a self-proclaimed OO expert, I couldn't take a chance of doing badly in the test, so literally went on a pattern hunt and the jungle I found there was more dense than the Amazon!

Design Patterns were available only in "dozens" which made me squirm with disbelief...Nothing against GoF, but they seem to have summarized every observation of theirs into a pattern which just added to the "overload" from a quiz perspective. Even Null Object, Debug were patterns! I thought they were "basic" concepts...giving them the 'pattern' name was just an overkill...Reminds me of the patterns inside our company that we have...We have a "pattern template" which is a pattern to write patterns...Can anything get more ludicrous?

Patterns were patterned (read conceptualized) to give our code structure, readability and extensibility...Many would put extensibility over structure and readability, but I think otherwise. In the 10 years I have been in this software world, I have seen very few instances where we really extended our initial codebase..On the other hand, I have been thrown around in projects and have had to pick them up in no time in no time...Readability and Structure I have seen have been very useful in getting me up to speed with the projects more than my ability to recognize patterns in code...Infact, sometimes patterns even obscure your code and almost make it un-understandable. Imagine mapping six classes or more to come to the real implementation in your head..I am not stretching my imagination here...these are situations that I have encountered and situations I hate. When I fall on a wrong trail, I have to retrace my many steps and start all over again..Not a pretty exercise.

Patterns were meant to simplify a coders life..so if you are complicating truth and life by hiding it behind layers of patterns, it might not be the best way to write code. And also, calling every bloody damn thing we see in this world is not a good PATTERN!! Maybe, we should represent GoF as Gang of Five (me being the latest addition)..Good Pattern?

I like Singleton, Proxy, Facade, Factory, Bridge, Observer, Cache and Command. I think everything else is a derivative or is just not necessary!!

Dell goes Retail?

2007-05-21T09:49:00.000-05:00

Micheal Dell says, "Direct Marketing is a revolution, not a religion". For a company that had fostered a revolutionary business model in the computer industry, and a very successful one (for it atleast) to say this is a BIG thing.

What happened to the business model that they worshiped for almost 20 successful years? Personally, I don't think there was anything wrong with it given the fact that it gave customers customizability and configurability that was unmatched by competitors. They have been market leaders for the last many years, till recently when their woes started pouring in the form of battery recalls, laptops bursting into flames, SEC inquiries. At the same time HP has been doing great and has been continuously eating into Dell's market share.

Dell's latest act almost seems like an act of desperation, a need to garner more visibility and a means to take on competitors head on in their own space. Dell might come out with it's own retail outlets like what Apple has or just sit side by side on a BestBuy shelf along with the HP's, Sony's etc...whatever it is, I think it will be a good move for Dell. If it can contain costs and still sell for the same price on the shelves, it can beat the punch out of the competitors...sometimes, being pushed into a corner brings out the best in us...hope that it does that for DELL!

Private Equity Acquisitions

2007-05-21T08:12:00.000-05:00

What's up with these private equity firms? They seem to be on an acquisition spree lately..Acquiring startups is one thing, but acquiring companies whose market cap is in the 9 "0's" is just something else. I would have been surprised seeing one such deal every year, but this year is a totally different story...Qantas ($8.7 billion), Hertz ($15 billion), Clear Channel Communications, Sabre Holdings, Chrysler, Reuters, AllTel etc have all been targets of the same. DOW almost came under the radar and I think it is still under it :).

So, why do these private equity firms acquire these monoliths? Well, money is ofcourse the reason, but wouldn't it have been wise to buy them when the market cap of these companies was lower than current? Dow and NASDAQ are riding all time highs almost..couldn't they have satisfied their thirst with other start-up/midsize companies? Is there a lot of money floating in the market? Probably true, looking at how dollar is faring against other currencies...There are a couple of other reasons as cited by Professor Jacob H. Schiff (Investment Banking at Harvard Business School) here. Some excerpts below..

* An influx of money on the equity side from pension funds and overseas investors is helping create an explosion of LBOs.
* Hedge funds have joined banks as major providers of debt, creating a market with more favorable terms for investors.
* Although there have been deals that have gone sour, the private equity boom can be seen as mostly beneficial for both investors and the companies involved.

The modus operandi for Private equity firms acquiring large public organizations is something like this..
Public companies are acquired and then financial engineering is applied to restructure the companies. They are then sold to other private equity firms or they go public again. The profits on such deals can be huge and there are also massive fees that the private equity firms collect from the companies they acquire.

So, prime targets are basically companies that have a lot of potential, but are bogged down by their own culture and systems or probably just the way they do things..Private Equity firms inject new management too in the hope of steering the newly acquired elephant onto the right road. The risk is high (especially with the impression that re-engineered companies often carry an unreasonable price tag), but the returns are well worth it...

Well, just hope that these big games are beneficial to all involved, especially since I am in the midst of one :)

Digital Identity- What's in a name

2007-05-13T12:59:00.000-05:00

These are the days where we spend more time virtually than really...we make relationships online, read news online, play games with strangers online, almost work online too...imagine having to work without Google...can you? I cannot!! Can't live without all the help from there...message boards, user groups, tutorials and many more! Such is the importance of that world...Not just work, our personal life seems to be trending towards it too...social networking consuming tonnes of time, not to forget instant messengers (email is almost a passe now :))...We spend so much time that we almost establish a parallel personality there which may or may not be coherent with what you do outside (well, in the time left after all this!!)...What scares me though is this...Employers have started noticing the importance of all this and almost do a profile search on your name in Google before they hire you....isn't that an easy way to find out who you are? For sure yes...Well, they have a good chance of finding out who I am "online" :)..

Goods and bads with that approach though for people like me...I have a very common first name "Vijay"...didn't realise my last name was common too...one fine day, I decided to do some celebrity surfing and put in the name "Vijay Challa" on Google and what do I get back??...a totally different Vijay Challa from some company called OptionMatrix...this person is into Marketing and has conveniently splashed his name all across the internet...so now, is that me? Heck not! But, do I have to live with this...Well, yes..and will my potential employers confuse him to be me...quite possibly!! And what options do I have....Well, almost none except for establishing my own fiefdom...the struggle begins now!! I have to over power his identity with mine :)...

That brings me to the David Smith's, Chang's and the Srinivas's ... what options do they have...Well, how about a name change ?

Hack.ala.cio.us

2007-05-13T00:53:00.000-05:00

Hackalacious! Heck, what's that ... well, that's just a word I coined a minute back...add hack to delicious and that is what you get :)...used the same name pattern that we used for our Hackday project..we called it Profilicious, a combination of Profiles and Delicious...all credit to Chuck, my manager's manager for coming up with that name...

It is a challenge to come up with something on a hack day and it is a bigger challenge if you have to do it with your manager's manager and even bigger if you are new to the group and the biggest when you hardly know anything about what you are doing, but any challenge is worth taking if it is interesting :)..This one was and had the added opportunity that I could know my superior better, so I just jumped into it..Our plan was to build a tagging engine for Travel users on RoR..Ruby on Rails. I always had intentions of working on Ruby on Rails, but never had the opportunity to...now was my time..the challenge was to learn all this in 4 hours without any knowledge of Smalltalk or any other scripting language and then apply the same towards building our application ..

Well, I will say one thing...me was not a big success building the application..Chuck almost did it single-handedly..I helped in setting some direction, arranging data and some QA and kept Chuck on his tasks and tried learning RoR all the while...a total Role Reversal....he was amazing and almost accomplished what we had set out to do...and all that single-handedly...no mean task for any developer, greatly done by a newbie (he himself was just 10 days into this) and for a person at his level, his skills were just amazing! Anyways, back to RoR...it's an amazing piece of work...am learning more by the day and am surprised at it's compact, explosive power...creates tables on the fly, inserts into n tables with just 1 line of code..can write a full-fledged application in just 21 lines...Man, it is just wonderful...very difficult to describe...only drawback, you have to adhere to some strict naming conventions to make all this happens but well it is an interesting way to program and really asks for a perfectionist to perform!!

Ruby has been red-hot right right since it's inception (somewhere in Japan I believe) and it just seems to be getting better by the day...Rails is even making it nearer to the developer community with it's in-built MVC architecture and ORM (ActiveMapper, I think that is what it is called) and if it is integrated into the JDK, no beating it! Me, am totally impressed with it and will build an app just for the he(a)ck of it ...if you have been thinking about using it but haven't gathered enough energy and enthusiasm to pick it up like I did earlier, just shake yourself..YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING !!!!!

From the land of snake charmers ...

2007-05-12T23:10:00.000-05:00

Even after India lands people on the moon, even after India sells it's missiles (BrahMos), even after India has the second fastest growing economy, even after Indian rupee races against the dollar like a mad dog, it still is known for it's elephants, snake charmers, Taj Mahal and it's cattled roads! Well, now we are known for accented call centers and for stealing the buck from an American pocket under the name of offshoring, but what happened to what we bring to the table ??

Last week was a pleasant surprise to me and probably an eye-opener to a few who saw us in a different light...We had our Hack Day on Thursday and our presentations on Friday..It was time for the wizards without their hats to showcase their personality, their talent with full freedom..well, just for one day though...brains were put to great use, mid-night oil burnt, pizzas devoured, eyes swelled and brains froze but what came out was just worth it and a lot more...dreams were built and shattered in a day...some very interesting ideas came out...we had ideas on pipes, tagging, very interesting mash-ups, recommendation engines, scatter charts, blogography, some hacks on our green screen (infact, our Green screen partners finished 11 hacks overnight...)..they won the Houdini award!! Whoever said it was difficult and time consuming to code on TPF might have got a smack on their face! If you know your way, you can drive through a flurry of bullets :D..these guys have been around for atleast 20 years and can make a parallel Sabre if they wanted to :)..to me, the best application was the Flex space app that promised to bring some order to the Flex space chaos going around town!! 21 teams participated and every idea was totally different from the other and the best part ..... >

MORE THAN 50% OF THE TEAMS WERE INDIAN/HAD INDIANS...so much for coming from the world of snake charmers!!

Google buys everything for nothing

2007-04-16T08:52:00.000-05:00

I know there is a lot of talk about Google buying DoubleClick for $3.1 billion pipping Microsoft who were eyeing the same for around $2 billion. Google did this as the deal will extend it's online advertising reach even further, combining it's ad platform and publisher monetization services with DoubleClick's ad campaign management skills. More importantly, it did this to prevent Microsoft from getting an easy entry into this space. Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon have been left with sour grapes..but was it a wise price to pay?

Well, me thinks so because whenever you see Google make an acquisition, it's stock price shoots up (happened during all the big, publicized acquisitions) and the rise in price more than compensates for the price it buys the companies for :)..Jab bhagwan deta hai, chappal phad kar deta hai (When it rains, it pours :)). The last I saw regarding Google's stock price rise today was 1.7% which is almost equivalent to what it paid and still going up...Sorta like a very fast mail-in rebate?

Game game go away, little Johny wants to play?

2007-04-10T10:39:00.000-05:00

Well, Johnie should have other things to do now!. New law in China says that under 18 year olds just have 3 hours to play per day. Good move! Hopefully, it will be a more "social" world soon, children being liberated from the shackles of their computers :)..well, some people might not appreciate freedom ;). Gaming companies will be forced to enforce this...Good thinking at a national level, never knew people at that level thought too much :P/

This is the "official" report :-

1MC writes "The Chinese govt is requiring game houses to modify MMOG's to restrict under 18 users to 3 hours "productive" gameplay per day. This "anti-addiction" software must be in place within 4 months, with games not compliant by July 15 liable to be shut down in China. Net9, Shanda and NetEase will be moving to comply with the government regulations. Users will have to register with their real names and Chinese identity card numbers to be allowed access to the games."

Hopefully, they will not have any restrictions on blogging, emails...imagine your life without it ?

Think Big, Act Small ?

2007-02-12T20:17:00.000-06:00

Sometimes to think big, you have to act small.

I read an article on BusinessWeek that mentioned this and I couldn't agree more with it. This was spoken in the context of Yahoo's renewed efforts to regain it's foothold in the search market place. Yahoo, a few years back was a technologists dream, but the fizz ran out faster than it started and the reason was Google? Not true..the reason lied within, as it always does..

It was because Yahoo became a "big" company and had lost it's passion to do better. When you are small, unknown and bubbling with ideas, all that you need is direction to become big and when you become big, the number of directions that you get makes it impossible for you to move!! Exactly what happened to Yahoo !! Google is still a little far from where Yahoo was and luckily they almost operate like a college (well, till now atleast technically..) to even be considered a company.

So, what do you do if you are Yahoo. You have to think the same way that you had been when you were small with all those heavenly aspirations. Yes, you have to think like a small company. Yahoo has realised this and has started something that it calls a Brickhouse, a place where developers can unleash their creative potential and the products from which would be launched "off brand" initially to minimize damage to brand and identity as much as possible..a place where developers dirty their and receive rewards for the same...a place where they are allowed to take risks and a place which is very different from the current Yahoo and very similar to Yahoo of yester years!

Pipes, Yahoo's latest success is from Brickhouse and is an example of what one can do with a startup mindset!!

Google Blooper!

2007-02-08T20:58:00.000-06:00

I never was really impressed with Google Maps, well except for the satellite image part that was later on adopted by every website showcasing maps...I come from a school that likes to "see" Google Maps, but follows Yahoo Maps. Last weekend, I decided to do otherwise and a lesson was learnt :).

My wife and I were on a mission to buy some stuff for my sister's newborn and some stuff for our own new apartment and so we decided to go to ToysRUs and GardenRidge. Both these places were in locations I was not very familiar with and so we dug 'mechanically'.

We had to start at 2412 S Stemmons Fwy, Lewisville, TX 75067
and go to 2512 S Stemmons Fwy, Lewisville, TX 75067 AND !!!!

Google came up with a map that made us travel round and round for 3.6 miles as is evident from this map.

Yahoo as always came up with something that was more "efficient" and easy. But, even this was 1.8 miles :) as u can see from the picture..

The funniest part was this!! GardenRidge and ToysRUs were right next to each other and we really went about our task so 'mechanically' that we didn't even realise that till we came back to GardenRidge. So much for trusting technology blindly and so much more for following the pied piper Google...

YAHOO =====| |===== PIPES

2007-02-08T20:22:00.000-06:00

Yahoo ends my sabbatical! Was busy with some personal issues the last couple of months coupled with an extended vacation mindset and habituated prolonged silence and the results were quite obvious. Well, there were none :)..till today...
Yahoo came up with "Pipes" today! Pipes is all about aggregating content feeds from different sources, re-mixing them to create new mashups and feeds for the same...Almost like a disc jockey! And all this using a visually appealing environment..

Was this all unthinkable? Well, no...was it unique..YES..Is it useful? YES YES. Did Yahoo gain brownie points over Google? YES YES YES!! Well, I can't remember when Yahoo came one up on Google, so this day should really be special to them..especially after the Garlinghouse thingie.

Coming back to Pipes, it is an innovative idea coming into existence at the right time. People are suffering from an information overload now. Feeds/Apps built on Pipes might just be the answer to clarity. I open up my Google Reader with nervous fingers every day fearing blog inundation. Pipes a few years back might just have been "an" idea, but now it is just a new dimension to how we organize our information. Goes to show how timing is so very important in this world!

I have been thirsting to get my fingers/hands on those pipes, but I get a message from Yahoo that says "their pipes are blocked". Don't know if they are proud or unhappy for the clogging today :)...Wish them all the best!!!!

Private Equity acquisition, makes a difference?

2006-12-17T12:23:00.000-06:00

Management has been singing Christmas Carols ever since our acquisition. Here are a few lines from them :)

1) Private Equity is good because it will allow us to do what we want to instead of what the market wants...

Well, I think otherwise..don't we all do what the market wants. If we do what "we" want to do, there will be no "we". I agree that there might be a few innovative ideas that we would like to pursue, but me knows that we are already pursuing such ideas in the company.

2) Valuation of over 30% is great!

Me thinks that this is the highest valuation you are setting onto yourself. Don't you have the confidence that you can grow much bigger and larger? Look at Facebook (totally different market)..they really like themselves and are almost shunning all attention from acquirers and maybe going towards an IPO which they think will earn them $8 billion dollars. Companies like Facebook, YouTube can be built in no time, but companies like Sabre are built with decades of perseverance. Acquisitions are important for small companies like YouTube, Facebook..Why Sabre?

3) Nothing will change after the acquisition.

Nothing can be funnier than that. When you are giving over the cudgels to somebody else, you think they will let you operate the way you want to? They would think very different from the bunch that thinks that a 30% hike in valuation is great! I am just waiting for a change in tune, direction and control.

4) Sabre will stay together as a unit.

Very difficult one. Me thinks that the monster Sabre is, it would be very difficult for someone to deep dive into it. Maybe, breaking it up into more manageable pieces would do the trick for them?

5) Offshoring, no changes?

Umm..depends on the new acquirers experience with offshore which I have no insight into. If they have had a good experience with the same, we have to get ready for some tumbling times and if their experiences have been bad, there will almost be no changes in direction.

Waiting for the end of first quarter 2007 for the final agreement and the changes that will follow :). Live life king size till then!

Good e'Valuation' ?

2006-12-17T11:48:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to talk about the private equity acquisition of Sabre while it was still fresh in my mind..Management at the top is in high spirits (guess literally too :)) and has been saying that this acquisition is almost the best thing that Sabre could ask for. I almost see it as a loss of confidence in ourselves, loss of focus, vision in what we are and what we could be. Compare this..YouTube was recently acquired by Google for around $1.65 billion and Sabre's price was $4.5 billion, just around 2-3 times of what YouTube was bought at.

Agreed that video is the next biggest thing on internet and YouTube with it's sizeable userbase is a very valuable company to possess. I don't doubt it's valuation but have the notion that Sabre is worth much more than it thinks it is. Sabre is the biggest travel company in the world and has agreements with almost all airlines. It's presence in Europe and Asia is growing every day and it has made some very strategic acquisitions there. Assuming that the average spending on travel per person in this world is $20 (very reasonable estimate!), we are talking about a market that is more than 100 billion dollars and a growing one...Sabre perched at the top can do so much and gain so much which makes me feel that setting a goal of $4.5 billion is like aiming to be in the top 50% of your class...Maybe I am wrong, maybe my basic stats or wrong...don't know..all I can say is that my heart sings a different tune!

Privacy policy for Sabre

2006-12-15T00:48:00.000-06:00

This monday morning when we arrived at work, things were a little different, actually very different.
We had voicemails from our CEO (each and every phone) and then there was a company wide call with almost no notice. Some of us knew what this was going to be about as there was a big splash in our morning newspapers, but for me, this was an absolute shocker. Sabre was being acquired by a couple of private equity firms namely Silverlake and TPG.

I didn't believe my eyes and ears when I heard this..especially the private equity part. Life the week before, month before, year before was just so normal that a change like this was not very evident. People had been specualting about Sabre being taken over by Amex etc, but even that was when it was in doldrums, the post 9/11 timeframe. We have been doing very well this year with travel demand in the US and the world peaking, so all of us were kind of under the impression that we were in stable equilibrium.

Our CEO's call was a normal one where I thought he made a good attempt of holding his emotions/opinions under control. He had grown richer by a few million dollars you see :). People asked about benefits, options, changes in Q&A and the call ended. I asked my VP seated next to me if he had seen any signs of this coming and he replied in the affirmative. People on the top of the ladder can see a lot more than I can, but he pointed out to something very interesting. He said that our stock price had been rallying quite a bit and he saw that as an indicator. Very true! We were flat for around 2-3 years and suddenly we had seen it increase over the last one year, the increase was steeper in the last few months. I had actually attributed that to "increasing" travel demand and us signing new agreements, but given the fact that we were in an acquisition spree ourselves and the hint(I thought I sensed one:)) that our CEO had thrown in our previous quarterly call, I thinking the writing was there on the wall. It was just that I had not seen it..Maybe my mind was wandering elsewhere..

Corporate America is dynamic. Empires are built and un-built in days! I feel special to be in one such move, although I really don't know what this holds for me in the future. For now, business is as usual....Well, atleast I don't know the schemes going on @ the top.

Growing Orkut popularity

2006-12-09T12:24:00.000-06:00

I have been on Orkut for the past 3-4 months and things have been very vibrant over there..Met friends whom I expected/didn't expect..At my age, one would feel you would see almost nobody, but weirdly enough I did see some from my very own circle out there! I started tracking the userbase. When I joined Orkut, it's size was around 28 million. I remember me waiting for Orkut to turn 30 (30 million) which IMHO took a long time (around a couple of months) but the surge from 30-35 million has almost been in no time! Curiosity got the better of me and I started investigating who was behind this thriving network (named after a Google employee Orkut) ...

It was interesting to see that Brazilians, Americans and Indians formed it's core, Brazil almost being the heart and soul with a whopping 66%. Indians came in third with a sizable 9% behind Americans who were at around 12%. Honestly, I don't think Americans really use Orkut that much..I searched for a few common American names and surnames and found that very few results turned up and of the few that turned up, very little activity and even if there was any activity I saw some Indians/Brazilians on their list ;)..Well, all this might have been a coincidence, but just cannot be ignored. Americans use other things like Facebook, MySpace which have a lot more going on in terms of activity like videos etc etc...But how and why did Orkut become a big hit with Brazilians and Indians?

My theory goes thus, ..the only common thing thread binding these people from both India and Brazil is that they are socially thirsty, maybe a little insecure and have a deep sense of belonging to a community. I am an Indian and I know the number of festivals, get-togethers we have far surpasses what I have seen in other countries. A sense of sharing and show-off is also a part of our culture :). Maybe orkut invitations were distributed equally amongst people from different nations, but Indians and Brazilians just grew it out of bounds virally!! Once you reach a critical mass, the whole process is self-sustaining, growing and feeding itself :). IMHO, India being the second most populous country with a vibrant "young generation" will soon come very near to Brazilian dominance on Orkut and probably even move a step ahead. Other social networking websites did not catch on with us probably because Orkut looks/looked a lot more "personal" and gave us the pride and exclusivity(not any longer) of distributing an orkut invitation that was not available freely online and maybe even the blue (our cricket jersey!) .. What do you think ?

Btw, search for Vijay Challa on Orkut and you will most definitely find me :D..wanna connect?

Video popularity

2006-12-03T22:57:00.000-06:00

People are unleashing their creative potential...Videos seem to be the order of the day..I have personally seen a dramatic rise in adoption over the last few months, but today has been special...

I saw two videos over the web, from my inner circle! I have always had the impression that my friends (including me) were a bunch of "keep to your circle" set of people, but not after today. One video was a parody on "12 Angry Men" by my cousin and his friends and the other was a casual, cool home video shot by a close friend of mine. All this was after I read about how the Pepsi-Mentos commericial drew in 10 million visitors on the internet.

Video content is really catching on..Some are making videos..others like me are passively consuming them (Braze yourself!, maybe I will have a few of my own soon! ) :)..No wonder why companies like Google are pumping so much money into videos... User-generated content is big now and is a very big factor in the increased average time spent by a user on the internet. It is like the next generation TV. TiVo even announced a new service feature that allows home movies to be sent over the internet directly to television sets!

Btw, a small digression..couldn't hold myself from saying this. Alex Tew, the creator of the Million dollar homepage is going in for one more million now! Instead of selling each pixel for a dollar as he did earlier, he is going to sell the pixels for 2 dollars each and is giving away million dollars to a lucky user...Me thinks there are enough greedy people to make Alex richer by a million :)

Google advertising on Yahoo?

2006-11-29T16:17:00.000-06:00

Well, not exactly, but what I saw drew in a few chuckles :))

Was just going through my Yahoo mail and noticed this BIG banner ad from Buy.com encouraging the use of Google Checkout for a 20 dollar discount! Interestingly, Google had more space on the ad than Buy.com and it almost looked like a Google ad :P. Google with it's deep pockets (almost endless now) is encouraging people to use it's Checkout product and is pitching it as a competitor to Paypal (Paypal is owned by eBay and 80% of it's transactions come from eBay). To really compete with Paypal, Google would probably have to work on their turf which I am sure eBay will try to avoid as much as possible. But, if Google Checkout becomes so madly prevalent that it becomes the de-facto standard of payment on internet, every merchant would have to provide it as a payment option. So, get ready to see Visa, Mastercard, PayPal & GoogleCheckout under card options in the future..With the rate at which GC is being adopted, we are not very far from that day.
For now, take a look at this ad and chuckle :)

DRM again!

2006-11-28T22:32:00.000-06:00

MPAA Lobbying for Home Theater Regulations : The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be commercial settings or at home meaning that you can no longer rent/buy a DVD and watch it on their home theater system along with your friends. You would have to pay a nominal tax to have that privilege....

For a moment, this news from BBspot almost sounded true. I realised a little later that BBspot is a satirical website that goes by "News for you, satire for smart people" :). Well, I really liked the satire here, but I think they are not far away from the truth !! MPAA, RIAA imposing all kinds of restrictions under the name of copyright protection, under the guise of protecting the works of an artist and many other such philanthropic objectives. Agreed, ripping is bad, distributing ripped stuff even worse, but restricting a user who has paid for the content is the worst. How else can you explain expiry period for a downloaded song (Eg:- napster allows u to listen to your music as long as you have an active account with them!), how else would you explain restrictions because devices have different DRM codes (songs downloaded from iTunes play only on the iPod and on no other devices)..What's makes it funny is the fact that Microsoft's Zune is incompatible with it's own "Play for Sure" media. How wild can it get?

Is DRM really necessary? That's a question on atleast a million lips right now? I feel it is necessary to an extent, but the way it is set up currectly, it is targeting the wrong set of people with a bag of restrictions. Restricting people who really buy music is not right and encouraging incompatibility of media between players makes it a nightmare..If I have 4 different players, I wouldn't want to purchase the same song 4 times! And think about it, it really makes it very difficult for any new media player to come into the market..If current consumers had to shift to a new player, they would have to purchase all their current music again which I don't think is right and sometimes it is just not viable. DRM is discouraging competition, acting against an open market..iPods are great, but I think DRM is giving them a larger lease of life...

And people who are "really" misusing media are finding more and more ways to get their music. They will get it no matter what! Your target segment is mainly teenage-20-30s crowd and most of them are rebellious when restrictions are forced upon them...So, in such a scenario, will all this really work? Maybe, MPAA/RIAA has to target the root problem here which is ..hummmm....higher prices..Maybe somebody should do a thorough research and find an optimum price and a good price model for music and movies and we will possibly see the end of this!

New Lamborghini

2006-11-25T10:02:00.000-06:00

I am in peak holiday mood now and have given away all my eyeballs to it(2 2b presize, isn't this how kids write these days! Acronyms are a part and parcel of life now, not limited to software any longer :). They are used so much that simple spellings have become difficult to remember).

Coming back to the case in point, there is a new Lamborghini in town...How about calling it a LG? Ugghh, that removes all class from it! This new Lamborghini is affordable and it can actually be driven without a license. Believe that? I am sure you don't..but if I tell you that this new Lamborghini is actually a laptop and not a car, you will and you will be disappointed too. Lamborghini and laptops? What a combination! Ferrari did something like that sometime back, don't know if it was widely accepted..but to think that the world's sportiest car(almost the costliest?) is getting into computers is just not acceptable to me..and their ads on Buy.tv are even more preposterous..

The ad says that this new Lamb embraces all the qualities of a Lamborghini that include speed (dual core processor), power (2 GB RAM) and looks (same colors, sleek finish including the Lamborghini signature at the back of the laptop) and reliability (good warranty). Every laptop worth it's salt offers this today, nothing special in this Lamb. Maybe some racy design with sleek features like a touch panel screen, outstanding audio, video quality (how about bose integrating some speakers into a laptop..speakers from it's stable seem to be getting smaller and smaller every day) can possibly give it "that" distinction..

Oops, in my excitement to share this with you, I forgot to mention some important details to you. This Lamb is called a ASUS Yellow Lamborghini VX1 and it is currently priced at around $2500. Take a look at ad here.
Lamb computer ad

Ask Google.com or Google Ask.com

2006-11-18T17:04:00.000-06:00

Remember AskJeeves.com, our good search engine from yesteryears that we had all abandoned when Google entered the search engine fray? Remember all those queries that you had entered and the results page with almost nothing relevant in the first page?

Well, Interactive Corp (IAC) acquired it sometime last year and it has been on a constant innovation drive. What it now has is infact amazing! Has it carried nothing from AskJeeves???...nah, it still has the red color and the butler elegance. Jeeves, the butler is no longer visible, but the whole website smells of his elegance. Infact, it is so good and so relevant that I think it might/will provide some very stiff competition to our revolutionary Google. For me, it hasn't replaced Google yet, but it has become my alternative search engine. Old habits die hard. I don't if my google habit will ever die. Ask.com is a search engine with character, an ample display of which is seen right on the first page.

Ask.com : Google.com :: A-4 bond paper : Normal paper.
Basic look and feel comparison is as simple as that. Differences just start here..On the first page, Ask.com displays a list of things that you could do with search and it even allows you to edit, re-order the list and all this very, very elegantly. Search results are comparable and sometimes better than Google.com. I actually found something on Ask.com that I couldn't on Google!! I really cannot state that more solidly because my comparisons are really not that thorough. There are a few nice things Ask does with the results. It "categorizes" them and places the categories to the right side of the page. Picking a category carries your search forward, but makes it more focussed. An obvious advantage is that you wouldn't have to spend tons and tons of time gleaning through the results if you can follow categories!! Apart from categorizing, Ask.com gives you page previews by just pointing your mouse to the links displayed in the results. Very neat and very useful!! I would never have to open a junk website again! Try it, you will definitely like it..Add just 3 ads to a page and it looks even more compelling!!

Ask.com also has a mobile search engine@ m.ask.com and it is equally rich and elegant and the focus is again on saving time for the customer with an elegant and easy search interface. Unlike other mobile search engine products, ask.com has all it's offerings in one place and takes the user to each offering by the click of a number! Navigation has been made easy and the whole thing is a pleasure to use..

Ask.com has also resorted to some very clever advertising campaigns and can be seen almost all over the web, has made interesting tie-ups and is just surging forward. I particularly liked the way it retorted back to the Google campaign where Google opposed that the use of "google" as a verb would actually dilute it's brand equity!! Ask.com wanted people to ask ask, ask google, but not Ask google ;)
Ask.com campaign

Anyways, enough about me bragging on Ask's, try it out for yourself and you will be singing the same tune. Competition is always good. It ignites creativity!!

Clever annotations

2006-11-17T16:32:00.000-06:00

Amsterdam-based Fleck, which is scheduled to launch today, is another new web annotation tool. I found this tool and the concept very interesting, useful and very powerful. We use annotations to generate configuration files and helper classes in our applications here, but using annotations to collaborate like this is truly innovative. Collaborating on the web makes it extremely useful.
I can already think about a few uses with my limited vision..I am sure it's uses are not limited to this...I would use this for

1) Writing notes and comments to webpages, articles I read similar to what I do with the articles that I print.
2) I could exchange this article and my comments with my peers and get some feedback on it. Having your comments and feedback right next to the line that you are talking about makes it very very convenient.
3) Elicit customer/marketing feedback on web GUIs with their comments right next to text/control they are talking about. Think about it...how many times when we had to comment, haven't we said "that grey button on the left of the textarea next to the text that says blah blah blah", to exactly tell a designer/developer what we are talking about. With this tool, you can put in a note exactly where you would want to and not bother about mentioning any other details!
4) Customers leaving trails on your blogs

Fleck doesn’t necessarily require you to install a browser extension to start adding annotations to web pages - you can start adding notes by entering a URL on the site itself, or just drag and drop a bookmarklet into your browser. Once you start Flecking, you can add notes and bullet points to a page, save it to Fleck, blog it or share it via email. You don’t even need to create an account. Fleck almost seems to have saved them right into your browser :).

Take a look at this..You will know what I am talking about.

My Google Flecked Page

For more information on Fleck, check out Fleck.com. I believe they are going to make a formal product launch today.

India moves forward

2006-11-12T08:50:00.000-06:00

For those of you that still think that India has a long way to go as far as using the Internet as a business model, braze yourself for this! We are doing a lot already. Infact in some cases, much more than some companies in the US! Long strides have been made in various sectors ..

Google,Yahoo and a bunch of other companies see India as a market with a lot of potential. Yahoo already has around 800 employees in India including a couple of VPs who moved to Bangalore from Sunnyvale, California. They already have tools, features specific to the Indian market!

Companies, both indigenous and external are all trying to establish a whole new world on the internet. Attempts are being made not only to enable businesses to run/use the internet, but also to establish internet core as the core of their business. Take a look at some of the below..

FlightRaja And Hutch Launch Mobile Booking Via SMS. You can book your tickets by just sending an SMS. Agents call you back with the booked tickets! Speaking of convenience..this surely is it! I am not aware of any product here in the US that can do it for us. Travel sector has been booming in India and we already have numerous travel agencies on the web. Some that I can think of are yaatra.com, makemytrip.com, cleartrip.com, travelguru.com..

Mobile is surely hot. If FlightRaja is doing something for travel, Reliance Communications is planning to launch a mobile video streaming service. The company has made strategic alliance with UTStarcom for this offering.Reliance plans to make money by tying up with event organisers and the like by broadcasting events on the mobile phone.

Media is another hot topic. Rajshri Productions is one of the largest content owners in the film and entertainment business in India, and Rajshri.com is their newly launched broadband video portal Rajshri.com and are showing their latest movie "Vivah" online. They aim to be the industry platform for video. With the vast repertoire of content and their relationships with other content providers, they are set for success.

We have Gaming portals like Zapak.com (with Indian games(versions of games) like saamp seedi :)), social networking sites like yaari.com, job-networking sites like connexions.com, video sharing websites like apnatube and more..

Every attempt to expand the scope of internet is being accompanied/followed by an attempt to expand infrastructure that it will run on. Goa To Connect The Entire State With High-Speed Broadband By End-2007
State government has signed an agreement with United Telecom Ltd for setting up Goa Broadband Network at a cost of Rs 150 crore. It will connect the state, district and taluka headquarters with 10Gbps bandwidth. Each taluka headquarters will be connected to every village panchayat with 1Gbps bandwidth, while every village panchayat will be connected to homes with 2 to 100 Mbps bandwidth depending on demand by the household. Dial-up forgotten, broadband embraced and lines that are only getting faster. Combine all this with a population of 1 billion+ (with an average age far less than what it is in the US) and you will dollaraa, dollaraa, dollaraaa :)

Live Maps Rock!

2006-11-08T08:47:00.000-06:00

Microsoft came up with it's own version of "Google Earth". They call it "Virtual Earth 3D". Visuals are rich, colorful and aLIVE. Going through the streets in Las Vegas almost made me feel that I was a part of a video game!

Users can choose between the two-dimensional views, aerial or birds-eye views, and the three-dimensional interface. They can use the existing map services, such as business listings, white pages, traffic information and driving directions, on any of the interfaces. Virtual Earth 3D includes fixtures/virtual billboards that are not present in the real world. Companies can air (earth) their advertisements here. This is a new way of making the internet a visually enriching experience for the user and advertising through it. This virtual billboard functionality comes from Massive, an in-game advertising company that, in May, Microsoft said it was acquiring. Massive technology enables designers to render a graphic on top of any surface in a 3D environment.

Aerial view

Watch NewYork at a distance

Watch NewYork up close

As a user, I love a few things about it already. Virtual Earth 3D has a click wheel capability (similar to the iPod wheel) which one can use to zoom-in, zoom-out, circle around a building. I had fun going around the Pyramid in Vegas :). I looked around the New York building as you can see from the pictures. The visuals are so rich that I can almost read/see what's going on the billboards. I love the virtual billboards (inline advertising as I see it) concept, which makes me feel that internet can be used to advertise in a less jarring fashion without affecting the experience for a user. Google and YouTube must be thinking on the same lines..Advertising without annoying users.

Unfortunately, just as every silver lining has a cloud (assuming a reflexive relationship between a cloud and a silver lining), there are a few deficiencies with Virtual Earth 3D. The biggest one being that it can be used only from IE6/IE7 and on
Win XP SP2! Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Linux, Mac users will surely be disappointed with this. Their browser integration is very good, but memory consumption is real bad. Virtual Earth 3D was running at 474MB! when I last checked my task manager. Right now, it can be used only for a few cities (around 28 I think) which is quite a small set. But again, it's just been a day. It will only get better.

Road View

Microsoft gets all it's map information from Navteq and since Google does the same, we might soon end up seeing Google Earth do something similar or even better. For now, all glory goes to Microsoft! Need more information, just go to live.com and try it out for yourself.

Amazon Clickriver

2006-11-05T22:34:00.000-06:00

There is so much money to make in the online advertising business, that everybody wants a share of it. Amazon has been doing all kinds of things lately...Apart from launching unarguably, the most successful e-commerce website, it added an affliate program that gave the capability for affiliates big/small to sell their merchandise through Amazon.com. It even got into the business of making portals (Target, ToysRus etc), and then went about leasing out the enormous hardware that it had created(while building it's big e-store), apart from making it's software re-usable, all through a set of very well-defined webservices. This move has decreased entry cash barriers for start-ups as they no longer need to "invest" in technology, hardware or waste their time worrying about these frills during the initial phases plan inception, execution. Amazon reduces their head-aches by giving them a pay per usage model that can just scale, scale and scale!

The latest by Amazon has been it's entry into the Google Adwords area with it's Clickriver product allowing businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com.. There are already a few players here, Yahoo with Panama, Ask.com with it's ad program, Google with Adwords etc.

With Clickriver, a wide range of complementary products and services can be advertised at the precise moment that someone is interested -- as they shop, browse, and search on Amazon.com. For example, ads from banks can display on pages for finance and investment books, such as on the "Road to Wealth" product page. Ads from photo printing services can display next to search results for cameras and tripods. Ads for hotels, car rentals and travel agencies can display on pages for travel books, sunglasses, suitcases, portable DVD players and other travel accessories sold on Amazon.com. Clickriver is driven by Amazon's A9 search engine.

A9 would compete with Google not on web search, where Google has a strong advantage, but on advertising, where Amazon has its massive catalog and experience selling products to leverage. Looks like that is exactly what A9 is doing..
This whole online search, shopping, advertising business seems so vibrant!

Vastu Shastra

2006-10-28T16:30:00.000-05:00

Websites - Your house/office in the internet world?

People do a lot to build the perfect house, the perfect office space. They hire pricey architects to design their buildings and many consult Feng Shui/ Vaastu experts for their advice on how things should be. Infact, in some cases, the architects they hire are Vaastu experts themselves. Btw, Vaastu conceptually similar to Feng Shui in that it also tries to harmonize the flow of energy through the house, it differs in the details, such as the exact directions in which various objects, rooms, materials etc are to be placed.

If we do so much to build a house, why shouldn't we do the same for our "Internet" houses, our websites. I know the idea sounds preposterous, but there are some people that do this for a living! Web designers are our internet counterparts for architects. Without them, internet wouldn't be what it is currently. Good content presented in the right way attracts good number of people. Content is as important as the medium. (Don't remember which my last Doordarshan program was :)..most probably, a cricket match!). What amuses me is that there are Feng Shui/Vaastu experts for websites and that is their core business. All I can say is that there is a big scary bunch of people doing their business on the internet and this bunch is not ready to own up mistakes for their bad business and are resorting to anything (including consulting internet Vaastu experts) to make things work for them. Our internet Vaastu experts have a sound business model, but surely it is not based on truth. Who wants truth these days! People just want money!

This is how the Vaastu experts have correlated the forces in our world to the forces in the internet world. I found it very funny :D/////

Earth is the layout
Fire is the colour
Air is the HTML
Space is name of the site
Water is the font and graphic

Adding that each element should be chosen carefully and in balance with the rest of the objects on the page. I know all these elements are funny, but comparing them to forces of nature is just ridiculous!

Here are a couple of links if you are interested in Vaastuing or Feng Shuing your website.

http://www.webvastu.com
http://asiapundit.com/2006/06/27/fung-shui-for-websites/
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060626SiteDesignWithVaastuShastra.html

Quality in Opensource software

2006-10-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

There have always been a lot of arguments and discussions on how Opensource software lacks in quality and how Opensource software vendors make money on support contracts by deliberately keeping the software complex. There are proponents on both sides of the spectrum and the many bands that fall in between. Personally, I fall in a band that aligns itself closer to the ideology that "Opensource software is good".

MySQL's CEO Marten Mickos had something interesting to say about Opensource software that really appealed to me. He claimed that Opensource software would in general be of "better quality" than closed source software not just because of the community involved in developing it, but also because of the magical combination of pride and (fear of) shame experienced by developers as their work could be scruitised in public by others. His analogy was even more interesting :). The analogy is that of your backyard. Our backyard (in general) is never as tidy as the frontyard of our house. We keep our frontyards cleaner than our backyards because we are "socially" visible there. Same with software, developers don't want to show their dirty linen in public..oops i meant code in public, and so will work hard in keeping the code good.

Additionally he adds, the reality of the scrutiny, i.e. the peer reviews, ensure that a lot of bugs and defects are detected and removed early and claims that Opensource s/w is 12 times cleaner than closed source!! Interesting perspective, isn't it?

Ad(ds) Sense now?

2006-10-19T20:59:00.000-05:00

Google released some stupendous results for this quarter. If you thought that Apple stole the show by becoming #3 in the PC marketplace and by growing it's marketshare like nobody else did, think twice. Gross revenue@Google rose by 70% and quarterly profit rose by 92% over the same period last year. Net income this quarter was $733.4 million compared to $381.2 million in the same quarter last year. The only other companies that I can think of that posted such tremendous growth are the biggies from our own India who seem to be riding a high tide with all the offshoring cash. However, the growth models @Google and @these companies are quite different. Google is a product company, more into creating new platforms, new products and eventually new markets by innovation, risk and excitement whereas the others are into services and are growing their market share more maturedly with little to no risk and thus very unexciting :|.

Coming to risk, Google's recent acquisition raised a lot of eyebrows as it was a big investment (worth $1.65 billion) and fraught with the risk of being sued by media companies for copyright infringement. Why would a company buy a company if it was a losing proposition?

To start with, YouTube has 35 million users in the US and 100 million daily video views. That makes it around 4 cents per video stream ($1.6B divided by 100 million daily views * 365 days) and the user base is still growing. Google almost paid around $30-$35/user to acquire YouTube. Coming to Google, it almost earned $1 billion in revenues from Adsense this quarter and currently has a user base of around 100 million, which basically shows us that Google earns around $10/user/quarter. With 35 million more users, Google can earn this money back in around 5-8 quarters (35 million x $10 x (5-8))>1.65 billion! 5-8 because there will ofcourse be an overlap between Google's current user base and the user base from YouTube. Considering the fact that video advertising is going to more effective than other forms (atleast IMHO) and that Google is going to find other innovative ways to advertise, my take is that Google will recover this investment in less than 2 years! Well, would you not call that a worthy investment?

Google has done this again and again and has done this once more this time. One reason it has been able to sustain it's momentum is the stiff competition from Yahoo n Microsoft, but the sad part is that it is moving farther and farther away from it's competitors (For example, Yahoo's results were good, but not great). I am eagerly waiting for Microsoft's results due next week and I hope they are good. I hate monopolies and would hate to see Google become one. Monopoly kills creativity!

Google Analytics support for Google Checkout

2006-10-14T15:16:00.000-05:00

Google is surely tying things together and to very good effect. Recent release of GoogleOffice tied two of it's important programs Writely n Spreadsheets and now they have tied up something else that is even more intuitive..Google Analytics and Google Checkout.

An e-commerce site owner can simply add a JavaScript call and a hidden field to each page that displays the Google Checkout button and will be able to see conversions and revenue metrics for Google Checkout transactions. This would not only give information to the e-commerce owner, but also would allow to know how consumers are reacting to it's checkout process, see the trends and make the whole thing better.

This feature makes life even easier if you are an AdWords customer, because you'll also see ROI and Revenue per Click for every transaction that resulted from one of your keywords!

Google surely has got it right again. It is making it easier for the consumer, allowing him to search for products right from his browser, making it easier for the merchant by giving him all kinds of analytical tools to track customer behavior apart from giving processing discounts on purchases (for every $1 you spend on AdWords, you can process $10 in sales for free on Google Checkout) and ofcourse this would mean increased Adwords revenue for Google. This is a Win-Win-Win situation..

Wonder, if Google can rope in Amazon.com as a trusted merchant..Amazon might not want to do it because that would be put it in direct competition with other merchants and also wouldn't prefer users buying from them without visiting their website ...but, well you never know. Google's reach is just too deep to ignore.

Agility in world 2.0

2006-10-12T23:14:00.000-05:00

You surely get a kick when a top official in your company endorses your idea. I had one today when our CTO said that the only way a company could survive and innovate constantly in this ever changing world of requirements is by being agile.

Globalization, OpenSource and Web2.0 have had a telling effect on the existing "internet" corporate world by having shrunk boundaries between continents and eliminating barriers for entry.

Survival tactics earlier are no longer valid now as the dynamics are totally different currently. So, how does a company face all these challenges .. how does it grow? The mantra for success is probably a little different for small companies and large companies, but what is common is that they all have to be agile within and outside the company.

Small companies should be agile in terms of assessing the market, carving out a niche for themselves and looking out for potential acquisitions..Sometimes, you could model your company "suitable" for acquisitions. Large companies should invest a lot in R&D, assess competitors and do acquisitions that would give them an edge over their competitors. Companies just cannot wait any longer as competition can lure your customers with more and more ease every passing day. I have seen that happening here in Sabre (we have been on an acquisition spree lately) and other big internet firms like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Time was precious, but now it is no longer available!

Showing agility in acquisition, assessing market needs, creating markets is surely important, but so is showing agility in our processes within. At the end of the day, even after making all those acquisitions, or for small companies that are building something, products have to see the light at the end of the tunnel and they have to come out in perfect shape. Mistakes are very costly as there is no time to recover. Whatever comes out of the company should come out very fast and should be flawless. An Agile driven development methodology can do exactly that. Development in iterations with constant correction cycles to meet the needs of a customer will bring out the perfect product. Stress should be more on how the product is being developed rather than what technologies it is using to develop it...and that could very well be the reason why in the last few years, there have been no breakthroughs in IT, but a lot has been done to make processes better!!!

What can technology do?

2006-10-10T22:45:00.000-05:00

What can technology do? Well, it can almost do anything..even enable people to play games with neurological signals as was recently proved by a group of scientists from Washington University who translated neurological signals from a young man and then connected an Atari Video game to a computer that could process these signals. Amazing, isn't it?

Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications towards someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by just thinking about it. This is surely interesting, but there is something else that happened in our India that amazed me even more!

Ever wonder what technology does for a farmer in India? If you are a part of that world, you would surely know that technology and farmers are never even talked about in the same sentence. Setting up e-Seva service centers in villages was a big thing...Farmers didn't despise technology, they just didn't know it...But, so is not the case in

Raigad district (Maharashtra): Roughly 140 kilometre from Mumbai, farmers are turning to technology to fight for their rights.

Four months ago, the farmers of Pen taluka in Raigad district were told the state government was acquiring their land to help build the 25,000 acre Maha Mumbai Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

That's when an activist of the SEZ Hatao Virodh Samiti, Arun Shivkar, logged on to Google Earth and used it to prove to the authorities that the land was fertile.

Shivkar says initially state authorities claimed that only a small portion of the earmarked land was fertile and that some parts of it was submerged by salty creek water, meaning lower compensation for the farmers.

But Google Earth came to the rescue and its satellite pictures clearly indicated crop areas. This helped the farmers back their claims for higher compensation.

This technology has also brought together farmers from 45 villages to put up a common front and protest the acquisition of their land.

The ingenious ways in which farmers in Maharashtra are using Google Earth to fight for their rights is perhaps a testament to how technology can really help us in more than obvious ways.

Well, I have used Google Earth to see satellite pics of my apartment, pics of Eiffel tower etc, other saner people have used it in local weather forecasts, traffic congestion reports, discovering hidden ancient villages etc, but using it to settle a dispute with the government is a masterstroke, and this being done by villagers just adds to the delight!

Interesting acquisitions

2006-10-07T17:41:00.000-05:00

Interner acquisitions pot is boiling over. Keeping people and companies (big and small) on their toes. The big 3 are in a spending spree..good for the market because when you there is "perceived" value for innovative products in the market, juices flow out. Juices flow out even otherwise, but we give them more freedom now! Flavor of the day or should I say "probable" flavor of the day :

Google gets YouTube ($1.6 billion).
Yahoo gets Facebook (around $1 billion).

Have to keep our fingers crossed and wait for the news. It's not just acquisitions these companies are into...they are into interesting partnerships too.
Google-Dell deal (Google default search engine on Dell computers, $1 billion dollars!). Yahoo did a similar deal with HP for $300 million! Google signs up with Adobe (Google toolbar installed with Adobe). Wonder if somebody is going to sign up with Sun for something similar :). Google signs up with Intuit (Small businesses can sign up with Google for Writely, G-Sheets ;) etc). Apart from this, I am sure there are many more that I have missed. Here are a few acquisitions from the past -->

Google :-

NevenVision (Image recognizing software)
Witely (Onlined document editing software)
Urchin (Google Analytics)
dMarc Broadcasting (Radio ad)
Android (software for mobile telephones)
Zipdash - Provides navigation assistance for road traffic on mobile in real time by GPS.
Picasa - software for management of photographs

Yahoo :-
Jumpcut (Online Video editing software)
Deli.cio.us (Tagging software)
Upcoming - Social events calendar "online"
Flickr - software for management of photographs
Overture - (Now Yahoo Search Marketing (SM) for 1.6 billion)
3721 Network Software Co. (November 2003) 3721 NSC is a Hong Kong based language keyword search engine
Kelkoo - A European based online shopping and advertising service
Musicmatch - personalized music software and services
WUF Networks - multi-media transfer of data onto mobile device
Dialpad - Internet Telephony, Alibaba (August 2005)
Farechase - Web-based travel search engine,

Microsoft :-

Nobody can forget Hotmail.
FolderShare - a File-Synchronization Technology Provider
DeepMetrix - web site stats
Massive - videogame advertising
Onfolio - web research
Teleo, Media-Streams - VoIP
MotionBridge - mobile search
TSSX - China mobile services
SeaDragon - Large Image manipulation)
Frontbridge - e-mail Security
Mappoint - Mapping
Futuresoft - Web filtering
AssetMetrix - License management

Other companies might not have done this much in the internet space, but they surely have had a share of the acquisition pie..I can think of ...
AOL with truveo (video search), teoma (search engine) and Sony acquiring Grouper, a online video startup

I am sure this list is not all-encompassive, but nevertheless it surely does give us an idea on where all this is all headed. Companies see Internet to be the future of media, entertainment and information and have been busily investing in everything that can capture a users attention or should I say eyeball gazing! All I can say is that I am in tandem with this direction because that is where I am spending almost all my time !!!!!!!!

YouTube acquisition?

2006-10-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

I wanted to desist from posting this, as I had seen a lot of blogs post the same thing over and over again, but I guess it is just so exciting that I cannot hold it back .. Well, not any longer :)

Google might acquire YouTube for a whopping $2 billion. If you thought that was a big price to pay, take a look at these stats!
YouTube is the no.1 online video sharing site. I know some of you might contend this citing that MySpace is bigger, but I think we shouldn't compare them both..YouTube is for video enthusiasts, by video enthusiasts and has been built by a bunch of video enthusiasts. Think about it -- a company that was almost nothing, less than a year ago is in the "ivy league" now...that is no mean achievement! Here are some detailed stats :-

Back in November 2005, Google Video was more popular than YouTube. A whopping 400,000 more people visited Google Video.

- In August,2006 - 15.9 million more people used YouTube vs Google Video! Quite a turn-around!

- YouTube has grown 483% since January, while Google Video has grown 279%. Wow.

Verdict: YouTube is the clear winner in terms of Visitors to the site.

In August,2006 - on an average each YouTube user visited the site 4 times over the course of the month. While Google Video visitors returned just 1.6 times.

Verdict: YouTube is the clear winner in terms of Frequency of Visits.

Bottomline is that YouTube has more users, more visits and users that spend a lot of time on their website and it is in a growing market. It current has 100 million videos and a userbase of around 25 million and the video market is set for tremendous growth with incresingly faster networks..A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is obviously much more than that :). Google surely wants to sink it's feet deep into the current social networking revolution. It is disappointed that it couldn't get as big as MySpace or Facebook with it's own Orkut and it surely wouldn't want to lose out on this opportunity with YouTube.

$2 billion is a big price, but is still worth only a drop in Google's big bucket. Now, is a better time to buy it than ever!

Only issue being .. all the copyright infringements that it will be tagged with once it gets YouTube under it's umbrella..But well, it is already fighting a lot of battles in this regard..this will just be one more! If it can come up with innovative ideas on selling it's content without affecting a user's experience and still make money for the media companies and advertisers, copyright infringements would be a moot point! There's already a lot of din going on against DRM and there will be more if user's are at the receiving end. Media companies surely don't want to lose out on this Internet era, where an increasing number of users seem to be more time on Internet than Television! Well, atleast I do :)..

Let's just wait and see if this rumour has any reality to it!!

Disappearing boundaries

2006-09-30T22:00:00.000-05:00

Microsoft -- > Windows, Office
Google --> Search engine
Yahoo --> Useful portal with weather, maps etc
Apple --> Mac, iPod
Sony --> Cameras, Playstations
Walmart --> biggest grocery, household utility store
Amazon --> online store

This is what these companies are into, right? Not exactly!

There has been a flurry of activity going on in high tech companies, especially w.r.t online businesses...Companies are poaching into each others businesses and lines are thinning down or are almost non-existent in a few cases..

Microsoft is trying to get into Google's Adword business, Yahoo has already done this ... Google is getting into Microsoft's office space by bringing in its own web-based office suite with Writely, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar etc..Apple is getting into media distribution, so is Walmart :)..
Microsoft is trying to capture the iPod market with it's zune player..
Yahoo, Google, Microsoft are entering into WebServices business like Amazon. Amazon has been trying to get into the search space with A9 (although it is built over Google)..so is Microsoft with it's Live engine..Sony is trying to get the into online video market with its latest acquisition "Grouper"...

Google signs up with Dell to make its search engine the default on all Dell
computers, Yahoo does a similar deal with HP...there was heavy talk about Google becoming an ISP..no one knows where that one is heading!

Boundaries seem to be blurring for all these big companies, but they surely are making this world a lot more exciting! Question on everybody's minds..."What's next?"

Changing dynamics..

2006-09-30T14:22:00.000-05:00

I was reading an article about how newspapers were losing significance in this e-world and it got me thinking...Who is responsible for this? Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft that have brought information to our fingertips that we no longer need to look at a newspaper? Well, yes surely but giving this credit to only these companies wouldn't be right!

I have been here in the states for around 6 years and have seen technology changes, some big, some very big right before my own eyes. When I was in India, around 8 years back, getting to surf the internet was a big deal! I still remember how internet cafes were always full and even in universities our labs were completely occupied. In fact, I had to mould my sleeping habits to find a lonely computer with internet :). Such was the demand! That was when computers were percieved as expensive toys...but things changed...

Things changed quite a bit for me when I took a leap into the technology corridor of the world...internet was openly available here and in the first few months after I step foot here, my roomate and I were very excited to have broadband in our apartment! We used to take turns in browsing the internet. Laptops were quite pricey then and we just had one laptop that I borrowed from my sister...Slowly things changed, computer prices fell, hardware was getting less expensive...my roomate was given a "laptop" by his company and we went out and bought a ethernet hub for $75 ! to share the internet..We had wires running all around the apartment :) and we were like this for a year..Things changed again, we found an affordable wireless modem and I got a laptop from my company...btw, this wireless modem was just $30! Soon, my roomate and I were browsing the internet from our bedrooms and we hardly got to see each other...

TV, which used to consume atleast 20% of our day dropped to around 10% as we soon transformed ourselves to "mouse potatoes"...We received new laptops from our company and also got a better wireless modems...Now, we have started seeing movies on the internet with the blazing speeds around and have almost replaced TV with internet..This is where my story ends, but I am sure all of you would have seen something similar in your lives...i.e us growing closer and closer to the internet!

As you can see, the reason for this is just not the internet companies, it is all the hardware companies like Dell and HP, networking companies like Cisco and broadband companies like Comcast that have all made this happen! In fact, the reason for the existence of some amazing products like Google, Amazon, Yahoo is the availability of a platform provided by all these other companies, which have brought users like me and you closer and closer to the internet!!

Well, internet companies are making loads of money through intelligent, unobstrusive advertising, so what about traditional newspapers? Well, in the first place, they were all charging prices far below the cost of paper even earlier (they compensated this through advertising revenues)...Now, they can give it free and still make the advertising money..(lots of us still would like to read a paper without paying for it) and/or start their own websites and earn money by advertising through them....I see that trend catching up already, not only here but in newspapers from India! Things surely change in this world...and technology drives most of it!! Wonder what the next shakeout would be :|.........

Web 2.0 for a better today !!

2006-09-26T16:24:00.000-05:00

The first thought that crosses our minds when we think about globalization is a bunch of job losses, cultural overhauls, turmoil, a job market totally tilted towards locations like India. While some part of this is indeed true, the ramifications have been far more than what is obvious! Globalization in it's pure form with no other changes happening alongside would have resulted in a clear job tilt...

But, such is not the case...Globalization has been accompanied by two other movements, one of them more recently, which have altered it's course significantly. I am talking about the OpenSource movement and Web 2.0! Considered in isolation, these three movements have their own set of objectives, each of them very different from the other.

Globalization is about having an economical, political and financial level playing field.
Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it as a pragmatic methodology.
Philosophy of Web 2.0 is to let go of control, share ideas and code, build on what others have built, free your data.

How do these work together? Well, for starters, Web 2.0 is about building on existing services, re-using webservices and pay per usage models characterized by examples like Amazon's grid computing, computing clouds etc. What this means is that any company small/big can use such services to start their business and thus save a lot in terms of setup costs! Add to this, the option of using open source software..makes it even cheaper..Free software combined with "cheap" (pay per usage) hardware AND a low cost market place just makes it an invincible combination...which means a bright idea with good execution from any location is all that is needed to compete in this market. Time to market cycles have grown shorter and barriers for next generation entrepreneurs are almost non-existent...

All this has resulted in a mindset change.. people are trying to do new things, companies are investing more in people (because their S/W, hardware costs come down significantly accompanied with very short time to market cycles) resulting in a booming job market, not just in low-cost offshore locations, but just about everywhere. A market with such a competitive landscape can only do wonders for the customer and will break the shackles imposed on him from fat pocket monopolistic firms!
Change is always good, but this change with Web2.0, OpenSource, Globalization trio is just better! Landscape changes => Companies change => Customers enjoy!

Go Cool!

2006-09-23T18:56:00.000-05:00

I have decided to make my blog look cool..Well, not exactly but surely want to use some cool stuff on it! For now, I have Google Analytics playing with my website and have integrated Flickr .. that's the picture strip at the top !!
Google Analytics is actually behind the scenes, analysing user activity on this blog and publishing reports accordingly. I will try to publish a report here sometime later..For now, the usage statistics are so low that there is nothing to analyse :)..

But well no.. I remember somebody said "Two points are enough to show a trend ;)" .. I guess I have a little more than that :D...Anyways, enjoy..for now, I am on the prowl for more ---------

Google in Retail ?

2006-09-03T20:53:00.000-05:00

My wife sent me out on an errand to get her some "anti-dandruff" shampoo and I happily trotted out of our small, humble apartment. I went to Walgreens that is almost nextdoor and went to their shampoo section and I started looking ... looking, I am still looking ... and then found her a shampoo! and then I looked, looked .... .. to see if I could find something better i.e a better "anti-dandruff" shampoo! The whole process probably took me 10-15 minutes which is a lot considering the fact that I live in an internet age where product listings are made on the click of a button! I wondered for a second if I was spending my time wisely? How would it be if I could do execute my manual searches the way I did them on the internet..
For my current scenario, I would have searched for dandruff shampoos on the internet on any site like Amazon.com and I would get back a set of results.
This is possible because products are associated with attributes before being stored as inventory on the internet, but that is not the case in the real world...This made me think...
Can we make our real world as convenient as the e-world? I think we can! RFIDs can be used to do this...Product manufacturers when they make a product can associate it with attributes and product displayers at the retail outlets should be able to read and understand them. Attributes can be classified as one major, 4 or any other wise number of minor attributes. Retail shops can have search assistants alongside products and customers can use the search assistants to enter what they want. If the search criteria matches with the "major" attribute of the product, it glows in red and if it matches with a minor attribute, it can glow in green. If the search criteria doesn't match anything, then of course status quo! no glowing or anything...

This whole situation would be a win-win, if done efficiently. Customers would ofcourse benefit from superior service and would have a lot of extra time in their lives to invest on something better (hopefully they aren't couch potatoes!!). Manufacturers can differentiate their offerings better and gain over competition..They can introduce a product and play with the product attributes and see how they can position their products better. Having a fixed number of attributes is important because product manufacturers would end up advertising their offerings for everybody...(Everything for everybody would make life even more confusing..)

Search providers like Google can get into this space and provide personal search assistants and kind of extend their Adwords program to the retail world..i.e take a commission from product manufacturers for selling a product through the device! I am sure the retail world is a much larger place than the e-world. People like seeing things they buy with their own eyes atleast when it comes to FMCG products and Durables! Google can make a killing if it can capture that market "efficiently". Ofcourse, a lot has to be done on the Product manufacturers side...but well companies are planning on moving from bar codes to RFIDs anyway...so why not make this a part of the deal ?

Hope this idea catches steam some time, and some day, some time, we will have this world somewhat better...But, what will people do with that extra time they save??..Now, that is a question to ask :)..Maybe, think about making life more efficient and sensible? Life surely changes..Thoughts of today might be norms tomorrow! and can anybody do this better than Google ??

Get's too crowded at the top..

2006-08-20T10:05:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it is better to be small, it is better not to grow especially when growth is not handled well!!
My company in all it's infinite wisdom outsourced all networking, desktop (well, now it's laptop ;) facilities and operations to another BIG company and it has been a nightmare eversince. Well, I had my worst dream recently :|.
I don't think that our company that is primarily into making, distributing software products did well when it made that decision..but well, decisions always look different after they are made :).

Anyways, we had a connectivity problem with a client recently and all hell broke loose..The first thing that was blamed was our application and then the client's and of course applications are always right ;). Well, in this case they were. We smelt rotten eggs in the network and called our BIG provider and all he asked for was whether we made any changes and when we vehemently denied that, he made us recycle our applications and verified that once more and then started the cycle ....

He called the company's situation manager.
That manager than called somebody from the firewall team who started blaming the client's network for this problem and obviously the client did not like this. The client blamed our company's network and soon it was a war of words with no resolution. We had to take control over the situation that was going out of our hands and get very specific logging enabled on the client's and our network and then had the problem resolved very soon! The whole experience made me think whether we complicate things more by trying to make things simpler? The company to whom we outsourced our processes is a very big company and ofcourse it has a lot of processes in place to handle situations adeptly, but well it didn't do us any good! I worked for a startup earlier and these issues never took this long to resolve!

We had NOC, Firewall, Coverage, DCNE, Situation Management teams on our side and the networking, operations on the client's side to resolve a simple networking issue and all this because the "problem had to handled by the right department" :). From my perspective, getting the problem resolved consuming as few resources as possible would have been the best solution! Isn't that why we streamline our processes? But, here this case is a classic example of overdoing it!!!!

AOP and merchandising ...

2006-08-05T23:49:00.000-05:00

Aspect-oriented programming is more than just a clever means of adding tracing to in-field code. The language has matured to a point where it can support both development-time and production-time code aspects.

I have been developing software systems using object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques for many years. So when I read that aspect-oriented programming (AOP) addresses many problems that traditional OOP doesn't solve completely or directly, I wanted to better understand its benefits in real world application development. I thought comparing both techniques would provide some practical insight. So I decided to design a case study: an OOP application in which I identified aspects where AOP might be a good fit and was amused with what we could achieve with abstraction :).

We can surely abstract out logging, database management and other similar aspects of our code i.e basically services that are essential but are not core to our product. Infact, this is what the AOP evangelists prefer .. but a thought occurred to me which might have some merit .. Why not package and sell our code based on aspects? I thought about an application from our team and it kind of made sense too.. We have an application that authorizes, stores and gets merchant transactions settled. How about considering authorization, storing and retrieval and settlement as 3 aspects and package our offerings accordingly? Can we not do that..I am sure we would be able to...Decoration can also be one more aspect that can be sold as per requirements. We can sell flash heavy, very creative websites to customers who are willing to pay more and sell cheaper versions to customers who want plain vanilla websites by isolating decoration as an aspect....I am sure we would be able to do it and can think about numerous other applications where a similar thought process can be applied..

But well, it is not important to be able to do it in a particular way...It is important to do it the "right" way!! And I really need to think harder to see if this would be the best way to do it..but surely AOP has more merits to it than that are obvious..Only time and our warm open source community will decide how far we go with it!!

Java, J2EE and next ?

2006-08-02T16:27:00.000-05:00

I have had this vague feeling for quite some time. Product innovation, exploration on the Java side has come to a plateau. Don't see many "new" changes coming by and surely not as much activity as there used to be a few years back!
Well, i know Ruby came in and then we put it on Rails, but even that IMHO is not a pathbreakingly different. I know Ruby is not Java but of the many things that changed in this software world, Ruby needs a worthy mention!

Recent focus surely has been to make things more simple, more usable and to build a larger and loyal user community. I cannot think of any other language that is as feature rich and as versatile as Java. User community and open source contributions for this know no bounds! I have a subscription to sourgeforge.net and get daily emails from it and the number of product notifications I see daily is really amazing. There is probably a product built every single day! May be even more !!

Well, now I am deviating surely...started out talking about how they was nothing new and am now towing the other line...Well, not exactly :)..
Java was a such a big thing when it happened (it still is!, but now it is an accepted reality) that anything and everything else pales in comparison! It changed so many things! Open source software is surely on the rise..Java runs anywhere and that is a big thing for a developer or a software product manufacturer..An open source developing will surely find it heartening that his creation would be "universally" used and his potential would be recognised by a bigger community..Wealth probably is not the biggest/only factor an open source developer would develop things for..Fame and Peer recognition and the satisfaction that his/her creation would be used many will surely rate higher or alongside wealth! And Java made all this easy....Opensource communities are surely very big drivers for innovation..Technology companies invest quite a bit in R&D, but that is not just sufficient. Opensource user bases are big and well glued and the motivation to build something different is not exactly driven by money and that is a big factor! When your objectives are not tied to each other, you do better..maybe because your focus is in the right direction and that is exactly what happens here..I can never forget something the CEO of Pramati (I used to work for this J2EE startup) said ... "Follow Saraswati with utmost dedication and Lakshmi will follow you". Sarawati is our Hindu Goddess for Knowledge and Lakshmi is our Goddess for Wealth. How very right he was !!!!! Pramati is surely doing very well now and can be counted as a very successful startup from India!
Coming to what next :)..I don't want to think about it :)..Even if I mention something now, it will surely be outdated by the time you read this....Such is this world !!!

Well, not exactly a good time for coffee now, but after talking about Java for so long, my mind needs a Java retreat. I will add something to my cup and make it better...tired of the same old stuff ;)

Riddler

2006-07-23T11:50:00.000-05:00

I recently came across a riddle that really had a very interesting solution to it. It amused me a lot and kind of proved a few things that I always had a feeling about. I have seen this in life and in my work. Sometimes, infact many times I draw parallels between software and life..aspects about software packages and life. Infact, my friend Suneetha and I conversed a lot in J2EE aspect about and in life and were even driven to a point where we thought we would write a book called "Jeevitamlo J2EE" meaning "Life with J2EE n J2EE in life"!!
This riddle kind of tells you that most complex problems have very simple solutions to them. Problems can be approached in many a way, but sometimes a little more thought, some analytical thinking, questioning makes you approach it the right way :). Before you get bored, here's the problem!!

A person starts at sunrise one particular day and climbs up a hill(only one path up and down the hill) and reaches the peak when the sun sets after having stopped many times for water, rest etc. He rests on the peak for a couple of days and starts back at sunrise the next day and reaches the bottom of the hill when the sun sets on that day. The riddle is to prove that the man was the same spot of the hill atleast once at the same time of the day on both his trips. Atleast once at the same time of the day..

With no speeds for the man provided and without the number of breaks he's probably taken, this problem almost seemed impossible to solve. BUT !!!!!!

Solution :-
Think about two men, one man going up the hill and another coming down the hill starting at the same time of the day and reaching the destinations at the same time. Wouldn't they meet at some point on the hill? Would the time be the same? Ofcourse, it would. Get the point? Excellent solution, isn't it!!! After hearing it, it sounds very simple! Well, so much for thinking well :D

Recent Ramblings ...

2006-07-11T16:26:00.000-05:00

Interesting how life goes..

I seem to be doing a lot and doing nothing these days :).
I have been reading, prototyping things in Spring, AOP, setting up Fitnesse and apart from all this setting up Paypal connectivity and even exploring ReD, an independent Payment Solutions provider. When you do so much, you do a lot and you do nothing :D, but well the whole experience is leaving me tired and knowledgeable at the same time. I am clear and confused at the same time. I like it and don't at the same time.
One thing is for sure though..Things will be like this for the next few days! probably a couple of months..and diving so deep after going on a long trip down South to Florida feels different. Can't even remember my trip any longer. Hopefully my wife still does..And ofcourse there are pictures to bring back memories.

Teamwork

2006-05-16T10:32:00.000-05:00

Go Mavs!! You are kicking some ass now! Dallas is surely proud of you :)

Dirk, Nash, Finley, Walker were all a part of Mavs not long ago. All of them, champions in their own right! The way they are playing now gives one a feeling that they would make an invincible combination if they were all in one team. But well, that is surely not true as history is evidence for this fact! They worked well, but were never invincible. Nash is creating history with Phoenix, Dirk with Dallas. Finley and Walker are playing excellently for Spurs and Heat respectively and all these guys apart from Finley are a part of the conference finals (Finley came very close too :)). Dallas never reached the finals with all of them together!
If you look at the current Dallas team, except for Dirk and Van Excel, there is hardly any other known face (this is IMHO)!, but success speaks for itself. Everybody surely knows them now...One fact stared at me when I saw this transformation of a not so excellent team to an extraordinary one!

INDIVIDUAL BRILLIANCE DOESN't win tournaments. It can surely win quite a few games, but never the whole tournament. Same holds true for a war or our own project teams. We might have a bunch of 'excellent individuals' in a team, but that team need not be the most successful one. In fact, in most of the cases it is not. A team is successful when there is teamwork, when the teamplayers are not selfish and when there is good camaraderie, and this is despite the fact that most/all of the team members might be just ordinary...Normal individuals become brilliant in a good team too ...

Teamwork makes normal individuals blossom into stars and makes a team work :). So, why not strive for the team rather than for ourselves!

V - lead !

2006-05-14T09:45:00.000-05:00

My mind wandered today thinking about managers, leadership and how it applies to our world and particularly the world of software I am associated with.
I read about the Hitler's, Mussolini's, Stalins, Lenins, Gandhis and learnt that some time in total isolation could do wonders for a person. (Many of these leaders were incarcerated..I want to be a good leader, but well can avoid being jailed :)). All these leaders had different ideologies, but what tied them together was their conviction and their unadulterated dedication towards the goal they set out for themselves and the people following them. They had the goal and the vision to take them there (The path leading to the goal)!

But, leadership although it emanates from an individual is a collective effort. Leaders cannot follow through with their committments if the followers do not show diligence and diligence can only built by collective ownership. You do it when you own it! Responsibility is something that can motivate people think about great things and responsibility with power makes them do it. When leaders share their burden with the others on their team, the journey is effortless..

Leaders always learn from things big and small and nature I feel is one of our biggest teachers! Ever looked at flocks of birds flying in the sky? I am sure that is a common sight every evening. There is something else that always happens. They always fly in a "V-pattern"! And this is because of a reason.

Scientists discovered that the heart rates of the birds were lower when flying in a V than when flying solo. Migrating birds use the "squadron" formation because it allows them to glide more often, conserving energy. The aerodynamic V shape reduces the air resistance, allowing the geese to cover longer distances. In fact, a flock of geese can fly 70 percent farther by adopting the V shape rather than flying in isolation.

The V formation may offer other benefits as well. Each bird has an unobstructed field of vision, allowing flock members to see each other and communicate while in flight.
The goose at the head of the V is not necessarily the leader of the flock. Apparently, geese take turns leading. As one bird tires, it drops to the back of the formation and another takes its place. Now that's what we call teamwork with a vision in sight and collective ownership!

Humans, like geese, were created to work together and to support one another. When we encourage each other and support our leaders we can accomplish amazing things — much more than trying to work alone. Learn from nature and contribute towards it! I am off for my cup of tea :)

Software Development, an Art!

2006-05-09T06:50:00.000-05:00

I still remember a few days during my childhood when I was at the crossroads of my life , standing at a place where I could take one of two streams of education, SCIENCE or ART. Art in my sense was the more gifted and I had a lot of admiration for the artisans. But, my parents pushed me into SCIENCE, I didn't have a big opinion myself so gave into it, but there was this one feeling within that always said, "Maybe I want Art?" . That lingering feeling haunted me till like a few days back when I visited a museum. A feeling dawned upon me that day and my perspective changed.

As I went from one magnificent masterpiece of painting, sculpture, or architecture to another, I began to feel that I was looking at something very familiar. Their structure, surroundings, presentation, just about everything reminded me of something. It dawned on me that there is a strong connection between these great accomplishments of the past and the few great software systems we have today. I'm talking about masterpieces of coding that you can't help admiring for their style, structure, and concise expression of a solution to a complex problem. We've all seen such systems; some of us may be lucky enough to have written one or more.

I'm not the first person to relate our craft to that of past masters. In his excellent book, Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative, Pete McBreen compares developers to craftsmen of the great Medieval guilds, classifying them as either master craftsmen, journeymen, or apprentices, each with a unique role to play in creating an artifact. This analogy is a great one, as far as it goes but surely there is more to it!

Art can be of many forms - beautiful, structurally brilliant, clever, cleverly useful. Code is the same way too! I remember pieces of code that were so well-arranged/orchestrated, almost like poetry. I know pieces of codes that could do a 100 lines worth of code in 1 and I know pieces of code that are very clever (for instance Java!, can run anywhere)! My heart felt the same way when I looked at these marvels in software. A software developer is an artist !
There are many other analogies that we can see .. We have "architects" in both software and art. Both artists and software technicians require tools to work with. Both art and software start off with a blue print/ spec. Comments make things clearer in both art and science (:) :) :)) and as in a great work of art, the parts interact subtly to form an impressive whole -- in this case, an amazing portrait of effective software development.

Btw, there is one last funny thing that I observed. The reason why Indians make such good software technicians might be the rich art and cultural heritage that comes along with them !!!

AJAX'ed

2006-05-07T11:35:00.000-05:00

AJAX is one of those concepts that turned into a rage after people started giving it a name. It was there in the 90's, people used it in different forms, but it's visibility and recognition as an "all encompassing" solution has been very recent(Well, in 2005 :)). It is funny to see it rise to such heavenly standards because it has always been there in the form of invisible i-Frames, right from the 90's. Popularity can really do wonders. It earned a million dollars to the guy that came up with themilliondollarhomepage.com. People really bought a pixel of web space for a dollar! Nothing can beat that! Acceptance, Adoption and Benefit Realisation can make a concept into a rage!

Btw, I just finished adopting the Ajaxian philosophy/ideology for a project of mine. We have a web page (a reports page) that scours our database that has millions and millions of records that comes up with a "summary" report. A summary report for that many transactions is bound to take some time! For us, it was indeed taking a lot of time, almost an hour. Marketing was running the report and they were ok with the response time as this task was only done "once in a month". The problem was that the "web request" timed out irrespective of whatever configuration you had for the web application. I can only blame our webserver for not being able to handle these "big requests"!
However, we found a cure for the ailment :) ...AJAXian philosophy came to the rescue..When the user initiates the "report request", we spawn a thread that goes and runs the query to retrieve the results from the database(ofcourse, the thread takes a long time), but in the meanwhile we forwarded the user to a web page with some graphics asking him to wait while this webpage displayed his wait time! This webpage checked with the background thread every now and then to see if the query was done and if done forwarded the user back to the web page where he started from "with" the results! This solved two problems for us, it kept our users and our website constantly engaged and that was the solution. I am quite content to be a part of the Ajaxian world and am looking forward towards adding a few rubies of wisdom to my world.

Industrious ANT

2006-05-06T12:36:00.000-05:00

Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it operates the same way as a make file does, but it doesn't contain the baggage of Make. It also has the added advantage of encapsulation. Everything in ANT is configured using an XML file. All the details are hidden in jar files. You would hardly have to tweak with the sources for the jar files unless you have a compelling reason to do so. One reason I can think of is an incompatible operating system (I have personally experienced it and had to tweak some libraries for FTP/Telnet for Himalaya/NSK (a non-standard OS IMHO. Almost legacy :)).

The best part about ANT is it's easily configurable, easily extendable (very pluggable), hierarchical, universally accepted and above all open-source! Many IDEs have ANT plugins within them making life simple.

ANT like it's namesake is very industrious and can carry out arduous tasks with relative calm. It can be configured to almost do anything and if it cannot be done directly through ANT, you surely have the "" hat allows different commands to be executed based on the OS that it is executing on.

Benefits of using ANT are myriad but the most common use of ANT is in builds. With the whole programming community moving towards unit testing, continuous integration by adopting Agile Programming Practices, ANT comes very handy. It easily fits into tools like Cruisecontrol and it can be easily used even configured all on it's own to do continuous integration and continuous building.
ANT benefits can be realised fully depending on the creativity of the programmer. Using a hierarchical combination of targets, he can almost make it run like an application! We use ANT to do remote building, unit testing and report synchronization here in Sabre, but I am sure a lot of other people would have put it to even better use! ANT can also be used to fulfill batch jobs by executing queries and as you read this somebody somewhere would have added something to make it even more powerful!

Three Cheers to ANT !

Agile, anyone?

2006-04-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

For those of you that are not Agiled, you are really missing out on something. Agile development/process came into existence quite sometime back and it took me quite sometime to really understand what all it offered but now I am totally into it, realise all it's benefits and can recommend it to one and all!

It can and should be customized to your needs just as its name suggests. Being Agile is to adapt and adopt the Agile methodologies to your software development process. Ummm..I will differ on that. We are not just talking about the software dev process. Software Project Management would be equally benefited from Agile.

Agile methods are a family of development processes, not a single approach to software development. They may not be panacea although I would like to say that some practices can be accommodated irrespective of what platform, language you are on or the size of the team. An instance of that would be continuous integration on the development side. Continuous Integration is a very active process and believes in giving developers clear and constant feedback on their coding changes. Lots of other aspects can be integrated with this, for instance acceptance testing, code coverage, complexity reports, unit tests blah blah. I see the major benefits from CI and Unit testing.

Project Management practices like continuous feedback to the customer through frequent demonstrations is another thing that could be followed by every project. The best thing about this is that the customers have a say in what they want and what they don't and get their most critical components built first. This will enable them to cut their time to market and will allow them to release features in a phased manner. Basically, they have more control and are writers of their own destiny!
There are many other aspects that I am in support of like story points, standups, less documentation but I feel that one should moderate the use of these and not let them slip out of control!

All in all, I see many benefits of using the Agile process (much better than waterfall and RUP processes) and see it as the direction most of the development should move towards. I have heard of people say that to see Agile thrive, co-location is required but I really have to negate that. I feel the best part of Agile is that it helps a lot when co-location is "not possible", just by the nature of software projects these days (most of them technically outsourced and functionally here). The whole process is conducive to remote management and surely gives the resources of the project a feeling of belonging! There is a lot of knowledge sharing and a meaning to development! Go Agile!!!

JDBC Debugging

2006-04-23T15:24:00.000-05:00

PreparedStatements in Java are very helpful and allow pre-compiling of queries making calls to the database run much faster. On some operating systems like Himalaya, NSK, pre-compiling queries takes more time than running. Caching preparedstatements and running queries on them makes perfect sense on such platforms! But, these helpful objects have rendered us helpless in a couple of aspects. Well, I can think of two for now :).

1) If you have any problems running them, debugging them is a nightmare. You could accomplish it by constructing the query yourself by adding all string, non-string attributes to the "?"s in PreparedStatements and looking at the log statement. This, I would say is very very cumbersome, especially for queries with many attributes. And a developers mindset wouldn't put that statement in unless a problem is encountered !!

2) Table schema changes make cached preparedstatements useless. Well, I guess you lose something to gain something :). Maybe, there is a better way of managing the caches that I don't know of..

Good news is here! There are a couple of ways that you could tackle the first problem. There is some open source software that can take care of headaches like this. There is a debugging driver that you can take a look at.
This driver works by intercepting your calls to the database (Interceptor pattern) and logging your calls based on whether you turn this particular logging on in your log4j properties.
The only configuration changes on your side would be changes to the "driver URL" and the changes to log4j.xml to include logging properties for the driver. I am sure folks getting weird un-debbugable errors like 'Comma not found' and folks using tools like Hibernate where there is very little control on logging final SQL would find this to be a boon. There is one more tool that could do it too. It's called P6Spy and does just about the same thing as the logging driver!
So, for now folks, go ahead and use PreparedStatements with Confidence :)

Starting notes ...

2006-04-23T13:54:00.000-05:00

Okay, I am a cartoon enthusiast and I love Madagascar!! I am not ashamed of being kiddish :). I carry the same inquisitveness of a kid and I question the status quo and most of all, I am proud of it. I chose this as my blog title because I like to mix some fun with work. Work without it's delicate, funny moments seems stressful, robotic and uninteresting at the least!

Btw, I am a big time Calvin n Hobbes fan. He figures as my desktop wallpaper!!And
ofcourse there is Dilbert to add some wit. I will try and sprinkle my blog with Calvin and Dilbert every now and then..