Me, My tech watch & My tech thoughts

Java in the cloud

2010-04-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday I gave a presentation on 'Java in the cloud' at Phoenix Java User Group and lot of people attended it. I was thrilled with the interest in cloud and great to see cloud enthusiasts here in Phoenix. Lot of people asked for the presentation slides and here is the presentation embedded:

My ramblings on 'Did you know'

2010-03-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Watch the video first and then read!

Yet this is a helpful video on how the education system is lagging, I always wonder how they are going to solve the problem. Who is going to teach all the new stuff? Will the teachers gets themselves updated on a daily basis? As mentioned in the video, the high traffic websites(Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc) doesn't even exist 10 years back. The world is changing so fast, are the teachers are going to update themselves at the same pace? I was talking to the one of the professor at ASU recently and he mentioned that he needs some one who can teach all the latest stuff. He can easily find some one who can teach Java, .Net etc., but he is unable to get some one who can teach Facebook, iPhone etc.

Let's forget about the teachers, talk about software professionals. I have seen lot of people who don't bother to update themselves when their job keeps going on. I have seen lot of people who doesn't even know about Facebook, Twitter. Lot of people don't know about the new dictionary words such as Googling, Twittering etc. I have seen people who doesn't even know about the latest updates in their expertise. I have seen people who don't know about Java 5 and Java 6 features as they use JDk1.4 at their work. I have seen DBAs who don't even know about NoSQL momentum. They don't even realise that high scalable applications such as Google, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, LinkedIn are not even using databases any more for performance reasons. They don't even know what a data store is until the database is dead(I hope it won't happen, but look at all the big companies who are dumping the databases)? They won't even realise until the day they can't get the job with their existing skills which are dead by then.

For some people it's hard to keep up to date with latest stuff. For some people there is no need to update(at least that's what they feel) until they look for another job. The whole world is transforming at a fast pace and we are not even bother to know about it. At least think about kids and their future! Teachers cant teach every thing that a kid needs. You as a parent should teach most of the stuff! If you are not up to date with the knowledge storm, how your kid is going to be updated?

Internet provides every thing, but do you know where to get the right info? Your kid might have been using the computer/internet from the age of 4. At least if you know where to get, you can guide your kid. Think about a second, think about your self and your kid! At least after watching the video, don't you agree that it's a time to update your self to know where world is heading? at least in your area?

Apple tablet - iPad, little disappointment

2010-01-27T11:49:00.001-08:00

Live notes from my freindfeed http://friendfeed.com/harigottipati

From Apple live event : Apple is the largest mobile device company in the world. Larger than Sony, bigger than Samsung. And by revenue... it's even bigger than Nokia.
It's official....it is called as iPad
It's the best web experience you've ever had, you can turn it any way you want like iPhone.
So far it's look like a giant iPhone minus phone features!
.5 inches thin, 1.5 pounds -- 9.7 inch IPS display
Powered by 1GHz Apple A4 chip, comes in 16GB, 32GBb, 64GB.... accelerometer, compass, speaker, microphone, wifi, bluetooth
10 hours battery, 1 month standby time
Runs all iPhone apps out of the box
New iPhone SDK is out to support larger iPad screen..... developers - get ready to take advantage of full screen
You can transfer all the games you bought for iPhone to iPad!
iPad version of Apple office suite. Is MS going to launch office for iPad?
WiFi, some models comes with 3G. $14.99 for 250MB and $29.99 unlimited. No contracts, cancel anytime. Free AT&T hotspot wifi coverage. Only with AT&T. No Verizon!
eBooks used ePub format! ePub is a free and open e-book standard, by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)
iBooks..... an e-Reader app/book store, lot of publishers on board - troubles for Amazon Kindle ?
MLB.com native app with live video?
Touch controls, smooth graphics, fast processing - a gaming device too. Looks like it is going to beat Nintendo DSi!
You can read the news papers in news paper format + videos embeded inside the news paper! Is it the end of print newspaper? The Newyork Times native app is like news paper, but they are going to charge next year!
It comes up with app store and iTunes store!
iPad 3G models are unlocked and uses GSM microSIMs
iPad pricing starts at $499.. cheaper than iPhone 3GS
So $499 for 16GB of iPad. 32GB is $599, 64GB is $799. 3G models cost an extra $130. So 16GB costs $629, 32 GB costs $729, 64GB costs $829 with 3G.
iPads will be available in 60 days. 3G models will be in 90 days.
No flash support!
No multitasking! Huge drawback! hey, it's not a phone to have that restriction!
"Our most advanced technology in a magical & revolutionary device" - not at all, it's definitely marketing push! May be price is revolutionary compared to other tablet prices!

Conclusion: Apple once again connected the dots of eReader, eBooks, iTunes, appstore, touch screen, PC functionality with new iPad. Nothing new, but an end-to-end integrated solution. It's the cross bread of Desktop and iPhone(minus phone features) - so it's a giant iPod touch.

Verdict : nothing new, definitely not a magical device. Sure, not a life changing device like iPhone. Very low price! Let's see how it fares!

That's all on iPad for now. It's a little disappointment in terms of features, but low price.

DROID debuts - DVD quality video recorder, 5MP camera with dual flash/autofocus/image stabilization, full blown GPS navigation, flash 10 ready browser

2009-10-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

Video - what iPhone cannot and Droid can do

The Droid has finally landed and Verizon expecting to checkmate iPhone's success saga with it. After a series of iPhone-bashing advertisements, Verizon Wireless officially unveiled its first phone based on Google's Android platform, the Motorola Droid. Incidentally this is the first phone based on Android 2.0. Here are the specs/details from the press release:

High-Speed Mobile Browsing

* See the Web at break-neck speed on the largest high-resolution display with a Flash 10 ready HTML browser.
* Look up favorite sites, video and music fast with a high-speed, cortex A8 processor and lightning-fast connection.
* View it all on the 3.7" display with more than 400,000 total pixels, which is twice that of the leading competitor.
* Work faster on the Web with double tap to zoom in and out.

Google Searches Beyond the Web

* Type your search to deliver results such as contacts and music offering a complete search experience on a mobile device.
* Use voice-activated search to serve up both your contacts and Google search results, based on your location.
* Find your way with free spoken turn-by-turn directions with Google Maps Navigation (Beta), with Street View and Latitude. View geographic information, such as My Maps, Wikipedia entries and transit lines, right on the map.

Customize Your DROID

* Access thousands of applications and hundreds of widgets from Android Market.
* Customize your home screen with preloads like Facebook and Google Maps or download applications for music, news, sports and games.
* Toggle back and forth between up to six applications at a time.

Multitask Messaging

* Integrate work (Exchange) and personal (Gmail) e-mails into one inbox with emails pushed directly to you. Plus, undo common operations in Gmail for fast corrections.
* Find your contacts using a universal list that pulls in work, personal and Facebook contacts
* Slide out the full QWERTY keyboard to comfortably text, IM and e-mail
* Have your work calendar right at your fingertips at all times

Additional Bells and Whistles

* DVD quality video recorder features quick and easy playback plus optimized YouTube uploading for sharing with friends.
* 5 megapixel camera loaded with the works like dual-LED flash, AutoFocus, and image stabilization
* Features 16GB of storage space (or upgrade to 32).
* Stereo Bluetooth® gives you the option of wireless connectivity. Or if you prefer traditional, headphones utilize the 3.5mm headset jack.
* Easily copy text and URLs to simply paste them into an e-mail, text or status update or copy images off the Web directly to your gallery.

Optional Accessories

* Use the multimedia station to transform DROID into an alarm clock, movie player or digital picture frame.
* Place DROID in the car mount to instantly launch a full-blown GPS navigation device.

Pre-loaded Applications and Enhancements to Google Mobile Services:

* Google Maps: With layers in Google Maps, view geographic information, such as My Maps, Wikipedia, and transit lines, right on the map.
* Gmail: Multiple accounts support and undo for common operations.
* YouTubeTM: One-touch recording and playback from homescreen widget or app, one-touch sharing with friends, and the ability to view your own uploaded videos and high-resolution videos.
* Google TalkTM: Easily switch between chats, search your chat history, and preview pictures and videos sent by links.
* Android Market: Browse and download applications created by third-party developers.
* Calendar: Ability to see who has R.S.V.P.'d to your meeting invitations.
* Amazon MP3 Store: Download the latest tracks over the air.
* Verizon Wireless Visual Voice Mail: Delete, reply and forward voice mail messages without having to listen to prior messages or voice instructions.

Pricing and Availability:

* DROID by Motorola will be available in the United States exclusively at Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online on Friday, Nov. 6, for $199.99 with a new two-year customer agreement after a $100 mail-in rebate. Customers will receive the rebate in the form of a debit card; upon receipt, customers may use the card as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted.
* Experience the all-new DROID by Motorola at www.droiddoes.com.
* To get the most from DROID by Motorola smartphone, customers will need to subscribe to a Nationwide voice plan and an Email and Web for Smartphone plan. Nationwide voice plans begin at $39.99 for monthly access for 450 minutes and an Email and Web for Smartphone plan is $29.99 for monthly access.
* For additional information on Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

For some tech companies, 1999 days are coming back!

2009-10-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

Despite of today's real estate numbers, tech stocks surged through out the day. Particularly Amazon cherished the market and it's shares jumped to $114.25 blasting past its all-time high of $113 set a decade ago by beating analysts estimates both in terms of revenue and profit. Also Microsoft this morning beat revenue estimates for the quarter ended in September. The company also crushed profit estimates. The Microsoft stock price surged today after a long time. The out look is flourish as Windows 7 the new operating system from Microsoft got amazing reviews. On top of that Microsoft is opening up retail stores as a direct answer to Apple stores. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Windows 7 in Newyork and opened a first retail store here in the valley. May be I will visit Microsoft retail shop in Scottsdale fashion center over the weekend to write the review on it in O'Reilly blog. Actually I planned to take my daughter to the opening ceremony yesterday as Highschool Musical star Ashley Tisdale performed for the grand opening, but caught up with some thing else.

Same with Google, Intel and Yahoo etc third quarter results. Most of the tech companies reported strong revenues(compared to last year) and the outlooks are promising. For Amazon it's even better than pre-dotcom bubble.

Next thing that will follow strong revenues are going to be the jobs. Slowly these companies invest in new technologies, thus creates the new jobs. Google already announced that it's on hiring spree. The good news is, tech jobs are going to be better in near feature.

Does it indicate we are on the recovery path? Can't say yet. On the other hand all the sectors besides tech companies need to shine in order to keep the employment rate low. Still finance sector is not stabilized and the housing market keeps declining in terms of the median price. Though the sales are rising(first time home buyer credit could be the reason), the median price keeps dropping. According to the September data, sales of existing homes rose almost 8 percent over September a year ago, but the median sales price was $174,900, an almost 9 percent decline from $191,200 a year ago. This needs to be stabilized for the recovery.

Overall stock market is doing relatively well compared to the last year end roller coaster ride. From 7000 points it is recovered and now the pendulum is swinging around 10,000 points. If you notice the jump from 7000 to 10,000, it was not rapid, it took time and slowly recovered - which is a good sign of stabilization. This is true here in US, but Indian stock market went back to 17,000 points and it was so rapid. Some analysts say the jump is going to fall back!

At least market is showing some positive signs and the next month holiday sales decide whether people have confidence about the economy or not? Based on the Amazon outlook for the holiday season, it's going to be lot better. If it is true, chain reaction will start from consumer spending to sales to profits to new jobs to stabilized home prices to recovery. Since the recession, the consumer confidence level keeps falling, but I feel this holiday season is going to stop it, if not taking the U direction. Last year around this time I advised about saving, but this year you can ease your savings a bit. Be ready to be in the lines on the day after thanksgiving day, but cautious on spending.

Bottom line - be positive, the good days are down the highway 2010 :-) Happy weekend!

Those who think I am not writing much in my blog, please check these:
Read my commentary on latest technologies at
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/harikrishna
Follow me on twitter for updates at https://twitter.com/harigottipati
Read my FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/harigottipati

Read my post on OReilly - Java for Google AppEngine, finally!

2009-04-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

At last after one year, Google announced the availability of the Java for AppEngine platform. When the AppEngine announced last year, the very first issue filed was - a request for Java. Since then lots of Java developers want to see their favorite language supported by the AppEngine. To put an end to that, tonight at the Google campfire event, AppEngine team announced Java support and many improvements. It is in early access and AppEninge team is still working on the final product. Though it may take some time to finalize the product, it is worthy to look at it right away. My first impression - it is outstanding. Eclipse plugin for AppEngine makes development and deployment very easy for the developers. Let's look at the features/limitations at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/java-for-google-appengine-fina.html

Programmers birthday wishes

2009-02-23T15:13:00.000-08:00

Today is not my actual birthday, but it is on the records, so does on the social network sites(Facebook, Plaxo etc). These social networks will remind you about your friends birthdays, so I am getting wishes from my friends. Some wrote Happy Birthday on my Facebook wall. However, Kiran is not sure about this, but still want to wish if it is true. So he send this pseudocode:

if (dob_on_facebook() == true){
System.out.println("Happy Birthday");
}

thanks,
Kiran

I sent my response like this:

public boolean dob_on_facebook() {
System.out.println("However, thanks for the wishes");
return false;
}

Regs,
Hari

SAP's new Business Suite 7 seems to be promising!!!

2009-02-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, SAP unveiled Business Suite 7 with a modular design in mind so that companies can pick and use what they want. Now companies can buy what exactly they want contrary to buying the whole suite for one module. It built around service oriented architecture (SOA) in order to offer more Web services, but it is not a SaaS(Software as a Service) model. Though SAP is offering SaaS via its Businees ByDesign for $149 per month, there is no significant momentum around it. Rival Salesforce.com is profitable with the same service for $49 per month, but SAP claims that even with $149 per month they can't be profitable. Salesforce.com is ahead in the game with PaaS(Platform as a Service), but SAP is behind with just SOA(Read my article Java in the Cloud to know more on SaaS, PaaS).

No more scary SAP upgrades
SAP Business Suite 7 is designed to ease upgrade process. SAP is known for its scary upgrades and sleepless nights for the IT during upgrades. With Business Suite 7, it is going to eliminate those headaches and going to reduce the IT costs significantly.

Why would you need SAP SI?
SAP is pumping a lot on the new Business Suite 7 and promising smooth implementations, ROI in less than a year under certain conditions. What happens if SAP’s easy upgrade actually works as SAP promised? Moreover if so why would you need a systems integrators –Accenture, PriceWaterhouse, IBM etc?

I couldn't believe that SAP is talking about Social Networking & Twitter!
SAP known as the enterprise software which is always step(s) behind adopting the new technologies. Now only SAP come up with SOA architecture which is widely adopted by many companies in 2004/2005. To my surprise, with Business Suite 7 - SAP implemented social networking features. During the announcement, they demonstrated the dashboard with Twitter integration. Not sure whether Enterprises want to use this functionality as Twitter is open! However, new startup Yammer(Twitter for companies, only company individuals can read the messages) may have room here if Enterprises want the Twitter like functionality. I think SAP is finally going in right direction. Right now social networking is the leading trend, and I am glad that SAP quickly adopted it and implemented it. Why I am not interested in SAP until now - because it is an old aged technology in my point of view!. Nevertheless, with Social networking integrations, my opinion on SAP is completely changed.

Netweaver meets Flex(Flash)
This week one of my friend mentioned that Netweaver even supports Flex. Wow, that's interesting.... how come a old aged software(Note: it is my opinion, no offense please :-)) supports new Flash technology? As it sounds more promising, I dug more details about it. As he said, it it true. Perhaps this posting on SDN(Make phone calls from SAP applications with Flash Islands and Ribbit) is interesting and even made me to explore Netweaver further. One might ask "why implement features we already have in WebEx/NetMeeting in a Netweaver application”? If you build the same in SAP, you will have a well defined integration path to the backend system, masterdata, transactional data and authorizations. Isn't it nice if you could display a snapshot of the latest sales figures in WebEx meeting? Also what about developing a multi user white board and discuss the sales progress in a Webcam, VoIP or chat session? Endless possibilities. What is going on? Am I the one using the word "Endless possibilities" with SAP?

SAP going hard with consultants
This week, the star of The Dark Knight(Batman) was captured on tape verbally assaulting a member of the crew. He even used an f-bomb and the news has spread far and wide around the Internet. It was harsh. Coming to SAP, during the launch of SAP Business Suite 7, co-CEO Leo Apotheker went harsh on lame consultants and said SAP is going to certify the people. In his words "I don’t give a shitt if it’s Accenture or IBM. I care about the customer. I find it shocking people are walking around talking to customers and have no experience on SAP. Consultants get hired of people and have no clue. It’s annoying but that’s a fact. Let’s start by certifying people. If we believe a project takes 500 days and another partner says it’s 5,000 days I’ll do it for 500 and a fixed fee". SAP is giving strong message to the customers to ecnourage certified consultants. So SAP consultants, be prepare for the certifications!

600,000 jobs washed out in January

2009-02-06T22:16:00.000-08:00

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US lost 600K jobs in January 2009 and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6 percent. About 3.6 million jobs have disappeared since December 2007. Nearly half of those are axed in the past three months. Even India lost 500,000 jobs in the last 3 months mostly in IT, Export, Travel, Hospitality sectors. In US, manufacturing shed 207,000 jobs in January, the largest one-month decline since October 1982. Construction lost 111,000 jobs. About 1 million construction jobs have been eliminated in the past two years.Overall, 11.6 million Americans were unemployed in January.

Deadly January
As I mentioned earlier, in January most of the companies announced poor results for Q4, 08 with upcoming job cuts. If there are no job cuts with poor results, Wall street will push down the stock price further. Hence the job cuts are necessary evil for the companies to survive in the turmoil.

Unemployment crisis

More than thousand lined up for 35 firefighter jobs in Miami on Monday. Some even were in the line from Saturday.

Thousands of unemployed people at Job expo in China on Thursday.

Note: My tech commentary is on Google shared items

2009-01-31T20:05:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed, there is not much tech commentary lately on my blog. As technology evolves, there are new ways to do this more efficienty. As I use Google reader more frequently to get the up-to-date tech news, I found Google reader is the efficient way to provide my commentary. Hence my tech commentary and up-to-date tech news can be found at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02970231190437493861 or start using the Google reader and you will see my shared news in Google reader under Friend's shared items.

Bookmark this:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02970231190437493861

First Federal CTO is going to be Indian - Padmasree Warrior or Vivek Kundra

2009-01-16T08:51:00.000-08:00

As President-elect Obama promised, he is close to appointing the first Federal CTO. Though the initial speculation was around Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joe etc - the list is down to 2 people now. According to the Business Week article - it could be either Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco Systems (CSCO) or Vivek Kundra, CTO, Government of Washington, D.C..

Here are their proifles(part of the information is taken from Wikipedia):

Padmasree Warrior could be the better choice if Obama considers the technology, innovation. She is the part of lot of innovations including seamless mobility(I was part of this group in 2006) and WiMax. She was the ex-CTO of Motorola where she worked for 23 years and managed the team of 4,600 technologists in Motorola Labs. In 2005 she was promoted to executive vice president and led a team of 26,000 engineers and directed Motorola Labs, with an annual R&D budget of $3.17 billion. Warrior first joined Motorola, Arizona facility in 1984. On December 4, 2007 she left Motorola to become CTO at Cisco Systems. She was born in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India and graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Cornell University.

Vivek Kundra could be the better choice if Obma considers government experience. Kundra was born in India but raised in Tanzania until his family moved to Maryland when he was 11. He previously served as Virginia's Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology in Governor Kaine's cabinet. He has been recognized among the top 25 CTO's in the country and as the 2008 IT Executive of the Year for his pioneering work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations. In 2007 he assembled the largest United States trade delegation ever to visit India, comprised of over one hundred business leaders, which resulted in a $99 million investment for the state. He has been recognized for interesting work in developing programs to spur open source and crowd sourced applications using publicly accessible Web services from the District of Columbia. His efforts to use cloud-based Web applications in the District government have been considered innovative within government. Mr. Kundra is advising President-elect Barack Obama's transition committee on technology issues. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and holds a MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland.

Full blown recession

2009-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

What we have seen in October, November was recession which is just getting started. December is kind of eased on account of the holiday season as no one wants to give bad news to employees and some employers didn't want to show the layoffs on the last year books. All those are coming out now and the recession is full blown from January 1st.

On Tuesday, Nortel filed bankruptcy. In 2000, it stock price was $830 and today it is trading at 30 cents.

On Wednesday, Motorola decided to proceed with only a Google phone. It may not continue with the remaining phones. The company confirmed another 4,000 layoffs after 7000 layoffs in the last year. (Update: Just got the news from a friend - his friend got the pink slip this morning in Chicago. Most of them are affected in the Chicago office, SanJose office seems to be safe. Full details are yet to be known.)

Oracle announced 500 layoffs on the same day.

Furthermore, on Wednesday, Google closed down engineering offices(remember I mentioned on my blog that Google will close all their satellite engineering offices) in Dallas, Denmark, Sweden and laid off 100 full time employees in head quarters after terminating 10,000(or so) contractors. Moreover, it is closing Google video, catalog search, Dodgeball, Jaiku and Mash up editor products as they don't have any traction.

Microsoft is planning for layoffs which rumored to be in thousands.

Today Circuit city decided to shut their doors as bankruptcy couldn't save its fate. Total 34,000 jobs lost.

AMD announced 1,110 job cuts, salry cuts and suspended 401K matching program.

These are just technology companies. How about non-technology companies such as financial, manufacturing etc.?

How long the recession is going to be?

Mobile developers in Phoenix

2009-01-14T23:52:00.000-08:00

We(I and Dr. Kiran Mudiam) just finished our presentation on Challenges in Mobile development - A Java developer's prospective at PhxJUG. Wow! what a response. The meeting is crowded with lots of new comers and interesting to see so many mobile enthusiasts in the valley. I gave many presentations, but this time I got more engaged with the audience. Could be the topic which is appealing or it could be the Kiran who is part of the presentation, but we got connected to the attendees. Post the meeting at Auntchiladas(Mexican restaurant where we usually hang around after the meeting), I found out that there is a lot of interest in mobile development. I found out from one of the attendee that even Health care(most of it is not computerized in US) is jumping onto the Mobile aggressively. Another attendee who is building the real time trading application wants to take his app to mobile. That's fascinating. Thanks to the iPhone which made smart phones much smarter with the much easy navigation and real web browsing. Sure the smart phones are getting much processing power and more memory, which is leading lot of companies to think about taking their businesses to the mobile.

For developers, it's a big opportunity - in terms of Jobs and in terms of revenue for freelance developers. The opportunity is huge and if you want to be part of it - it's time to update your skill set.

It's surprising to see so much focus on mobile development in the desert city. It's not just Java ME developers - valley has iPhone developers user group and Android developers users group who meets once in a month. Which is why I say Phoenix is also the one of the happening place. Otherwise how come valley has number of enthusiasts who is catching up with latest technologies?

Giving presentation on "Challenges in Mobile Develeopment - A Java Developers Perspective"

2009-01-13T13:44:00.000-08:00

I am going to give presentation on Blackberry Storm and Palm Pre and my friend Kiran is going to talk about iPhone and Google G1. In case if you are interested, here are the details:

Title: Challenges in Mobile Development- A Java Developers Perspective
Abstract: The Speakers will present the challenges in doing development for the mobile. They will cover the latest smart phone platforms, from the iPhone, Android, Storm and the Palm Pre from a Java developers perspective - those that don't, and those that scale with some assistance.
Speakers: Dr. Kiran Mudiam, Mobile Architect, TSI-Mobility, American Express
and
Hari Gottipati, Architect, VCommerce
When:Wednesday January 14th, 2009 at 6:30 p.m.
Where:UACT - University of Advancing Computer Technology
2625 West Baseline Road, Tempe(Just south and west of Fry's Electronics)
Food, Beverage, and Giveaway Sponsor: Oracle

My O'Reilly post - Java in the Cloud

2008-12-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

No one is talking about the Web 2.0, AJAX, SaaS, or SOA these days. It doesn't mean that no one is using these technologies, it is just that these are not the buzzwords anymore. The latest buzzword is "Cloud Computing". Every one is talking about building apps in cloud or moving the apps to cloud. There are plenty of jobs on job boards looking for the people with the skills: "familiarity with cloud" or "expertise in cloud". What is the cloud? Every one defines the cloud in their own way, here is my take on it. Companies whose main business is not Computer related, they outsource their IT work to some computer consulting firm. It is because IT is not their main business and some times it makes sense to hand it over. Similarly, for application development companies - the focus is application development, not hosting the applications. In addition to the application developers, they need to have IT people, hardware to host the apps. For some companies it makes sense to outsource the IT and hardware. In other words, you are outsourcing your application to a different company. Application outsourcing used to be to hosting companies, but that's changing to the cloud due to its infrastructure. The cloud makes it very easy to scale an app for rapid growth compared to the hosting companies. Cloud will take away all the hardware management and IT risks from you. Continue reading at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/12/java-in-the-cloud.html

Layoffs in full swing, again

2008-12-05T19:58:00.000-08:00

Its been at least 3 weeks, since I heard the massive layoffs. Again, this week witnessed many layoffs. Without this week layoffs, the Labor Department said on Friday that U.S. lost 533,000 jobs in November, most since 1974. The unemployment rate hit 6.7 percent last month, the highest since 1993, which adds up to 10.3 million Americans out of work, 2 million more than the population of New York City.

To add some more layoffs to this number, At&T announced 12,000 layoffs this week.
Though Google didn't officially announce it - sources say 10,000 Google contractors are losing their jobs. It is also dropping the new data center plan in Oregon and closing all satelite offices. Its closing down the experimental and research projects to focus the engineers on the core products. Read Google under wall street pressure, as many as 10,000 layoffs underway?
Viacom, which owns MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures announced 850 layoffs.
DuPont, the chemical manufacturer said it will cut 2,500 jobs and will release 4,000 contractors by the end of this year, with more contractor cuts expected in 2009.
Credit Suisse, the bank said it is eliminating 5,300 jobs—or about 11 percent of its global workforce.
GM is laying off another 2000 employees.
Washington Mutual laying off another 335 employees.
United Airlines is laying off 1200 employees after the holiday rush.
US jet engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney has decided to lay off 350 workers.
Real Networks who is behind Real Player laying off 130 people.
BMC Software to cut 350 jobs, 6 pct of work force.
A new round of layoffs began Wednesday at the Arizona Republic as the newspaper’s parent company Gannett Inc. Sources said 68 employees were laid off today, including 25 from the Republic's newsroom. The media company is cutting about 2,000 workers from its newspaper work force of 20,000 people.
Layoffs at Intel? Analysts say the company could be preparing to lay off as much as 10 percent of its work force.

There are 100s of companies that announced layoffs, but this list is partial. How long is this recession and how many layoffs on the way? Can't even think of it. Sigh!!!

Good news on the way for new home buyers!!!

2008-12-05T18:40:00.000-08:00

Treasury Secretary Paulson is said to be considering a plan to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to push down mortgage rates for new home purchases to as low as 4.5%. I heard this on NPR's marketplace yesterday while coming back from the work. Excerpts from that story:

Treasury Department is thinking about trying to get mortgage rates down quite a bit to 4.5 percent. The concept is to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are there, to bring capital to the housing market and to use the Treasury, working with Fannie and Freddie, to get the rates down lower. This program is for new buyers of homes that are on the market. It wouldn't do anything for people who want to refinance to get out from under mortgages they can't get afford anymore. It wouldn't help the foreclosures. But it will indirectly help it because part of the problem is that people who can't make payments on their loans, can't sell their homes either. So if we expand the home ownership base and some of those homes that have no choice but to go into foreclosure, they can be sold.

Its official - US in recession. Worse since post-world war II

2008-12-02T20:00:00.000-08:00

National Bureau of Economic Research, which made official on Monday that US in recession since December, 2007. The Cambridge nonprofit, which dates US business cycles and counts the nation's top academic economists among its researchers, said the economy slipped into recession in December, 2007. The last two recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001 lasted eight months each, and only two of the 10 previous post-Depression downturns lasted as long as a full year which are 1981-82 and 1973-75, each lasted 16 months. These two recessions are the longest post-World War II recessions.

Longer than previous ones?
Since there is no indication of end in a downturn, at least - this could last up to the mid of 2009. Which means its 17 months, and it makes this recession the longest since the great depression in 1930. Some say it will continue through the 2009, if that is the case this recession will be the worst recession in the history. Here are the statistics from National Bureau of Economic Research:

Image courtesy of CNN.

Just to remember the Great Depression, from Wikipedia - it was a worldwide economic downturn starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in modern history, and is used in the 21st century as an example of how far the world's economy can fall. The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians most often use as a starting date the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday.

Google under Wall strett pressure, as many as 10,000 layoffs underway?

2008-11-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

Update: 2 days after I wrote this, Wall street general wrote an article which align to my views.

Google is under Wall street pressure. The stock dipped to $250 from high of $740 in less than a year. Roughly, it lost 66% of the market value. On top of that, analysts are reporting that on line advertising is declining. Sure, Google is under a lot of pressure and finding the ways to maximize the revenue.

Pump ads on all Google sites:
Google started displaying the ads on Google finance site(See my coverage on this) to cash its success. Sure it deserves to cash it out, but until now Google maintained some of the sites ad free. However, thats going to change it. Soon we will see the ads on all of it sites including Google office suite(Docs, Spread sheets), Google news etc. I heard that Google is already testing the ads on Google news.

Cut down the experiments and R&D:
Last week Google shutdown 2 sites Lively with the message "Lively is shutting down. Rooms and avatars will not be available after December 31st, 2008" and SearchMash with the message "has gone the way of the dinosaur". The official Google explanation for shutting down Lively.com is:

It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

Its surprise to see Google products seeing the dust due to the resources. Sure, Google is losing work force, hence the resource prioritization.

Layoffs, ~~layoffs - 10,000 layoffs~~:
Google and its search business are not recession proof. Since August, Google has been laying off staff and the number could be up to 10,000 jobs. There are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for Google. According to a CNET story:

Google spokeswoman Jane Penner didn't share too many details Monday, such as how many contractors are affected, whether contracts are being canceled or just not renewed, how many contractors Google will hire, and over what time frame the changes will take place.
"We have 10,000, and we have had a plan in place for awhile to significantly reduce that number," she said. "This is something we've been thinking about for awhile--six or seven months. It predates the most acute phase of the (present economic) crisis."

There is no doubt Google is not immune to the economic downturn and with the slowdown in online advertising, their honeymoon is over. Troubles are just beginning at Googleplex.

Update: Changed heading to reflect my intention of "layoffs could be as many as 10,000". Just to clarify, layoffs number is not confirmed by Google or anyone.

Which cities are best to find a job in the tough economy?

2008-11-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

Being a techie we always think Bay area is the first choice for tech jobs followed by tri-cities(Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC). Third choice would be New York and New Jersey. But, what are the best places to find the job? CareerBuilder.com lists 25 best cities to find the job by unemployment rates.

Sioux Falls - South Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the US followed by Rapid City - South Dakota, Idaho Falls - Idaho , Bismarck - North Dakota, Houma - Louisiana. Find the complete list and unemployment rates here. If you are not tied to particular location, you can move to one of these cities to get the job fast.

How to test a cell phone in different climate conditions?

2008-11-24T08:44:00.000-08:00

How you make sure that the cell phone can work in summer in Arizona deserts and in winter in Russia? How you make sure that phone still function after dropping on the floor and dropping in the water? How you make sure each key and 4-way menu button work?

I worked on one of the Motorola products, and we tested it in Motorola labs in a similar way. Though the lab I visited was not sophisticated as the Nokia test labs(in video), Motorola has the similar labs in Chicago. Our QA team flew to Chicago to test our product against all the Bluetooth devices in the Motorola Bluetooth labs which has all the Bluetooth phones around the world.

Software testing is lot different from hard ware testing, particularly the mobile phone testing. You need to create the hot environment, freezing environment, rain, drizzling, shower etc. Very interesting to watch that process. Watch the video below recorded by Mobile Industry Review:

Nokia's Handset Test Laboratory from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Google placing ads on Google finance

2008-11-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

Google started placing ads on Google finance site which is still in beta from past 2 years. It looks like Google is under pressure to meet the Wall street expectations, hence started pumping the ads on Google finance site. Soon we may see the ads on all of its sites. Sure the recession is going to kill the lots of the sites which offers free services - if the free services cannot make the (enough) money via advertising.

Obama created history, internet technologies also helped him

2008-11-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

First, congrats to Obama(who is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and beleived to carry Lord Hanuman statue with him for good luck) for becoming the first African-American president of the United States. Americans wanted the change. The CHANGE that Obama can bring!!! .Americans should be proud of themselves for electing an African-American as leader of the USA. It is historical. It is proud moment for the Americans.

You know the primary reason for his victory - youth vote(back at home in AP(India) also leaders are focusing on youth, but leaders there are not clever like Obama :-) ). Youth that never utilized their vote..... utilized first time and voted for him. The unexpected turn out of the youth spoiled the McCain dreams.

One of the way he connected to the youth by utilizing internet - latest technologies such as MySapce, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr. Most of the youth are on Social networking sites and best way to connect them is becoming part of their networks. He is the one who understands the power of Internet and adopted latest technologies. Lot of people says/argues/feels that why we should know/learn/use the latest technologies. He is different, he followed the technical advise by his campaign and created the history.

- He has LinkedIn account where he has tons of people in his connections to focus on professionals. His team regularly accepts the connections from others. See his profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama.
- He has FaceBook and MySpace accounts where he focused on youth/teens. http://www.facebook.com/barackobama and http://www.myspace.com/barackobama
- He has twitter(micro blogging) account, where he/his team posts up to date information about his activities/policies. http://twitter.com/BarackObama
- He has Flickr account where he posts all his latest photos.http://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/
- He has YouTube account where he posts all the videos.
- His campaign contacted the company I work for to add the ecommerce functionality to his campaing site http://www.barackobama.com - to generate the donations by selling T-shirts, mugs etc.(Ofcourse I can't reveal what happened to that deal:-) )
- He is the one leader who utilized latest internet technologies for his campaign.
- He is the one started the website www.change.gov after elected as a president - where he posts what he is doing, and what he is going to do for the country, any body can post messages to him on likes/dislikes about his administration. He is making the site like a social networking site where whole nation is part of the network.

He can change USA into USA 2.0
He is the one promised that the country needs the CTO position. Lot of people opinioned that it should be the CIO position for the country. But he is the one who understands the difference between CTO and CIO. He is right, the country needs the technical geek who can lead innovation(CTO), not the IT savvy who can manage(CIO) the needs. Rumor is Bill Joy, Sun Evangelist and inventor of the Java Mobile will be the first CTO of the United States.

Just like web became Web 2.0 with the latest technologies, he is the one going to take USA into USA 2.0. America has been re-booted, with a new operating system. The past was a PC, Obama is a Mac. At last we have an operating system that won’t keep crashing. I am sure, he can change the America by rebooting, restarting with a new OS(policies). He created history by winning, he is also going to create the history with his policies/work in a way America remembered the Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy etc.

Very balanced leader
He is a very balanced person, true leader who can take win/loose as the same. Can't see anxiety while the results coming, can't see over joy after declaring the results. These are the pictures from his Flickr account taken on November 5th watching the results on TV.

Before announcing the results

After the results

Good luck Obama!!!

Countless layoffs, falling home prices, Phoenix is shaking up in the Financial turmoil

2008-10-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

This Monday I was entering into the building where I work. A woman passing by with tears and telling her mother on the mobile "Mom, I just got laid off". I had a big sigh and murmured myself "God bless her, and hopefully she will find better job". Then immediately I got a doubt "is she coming from my office. Was she working in my office?". I never seen her in my office. What if she was working in my office? Layoffs in my office? Another sigh, but immediately I became normal as I went through this couple of times. Then I was passing DHL office and realized that its DHL, laying off the people. Its not just layoffs, they closed down the office. Its so common(should I say so natural) these days and valley is not immune to the financial crisis. This week is so bad for the valley as all the major tech companies announced layoffs and these mostly effects the valley IT jobs.

DHL: Goodbye Phoenix?
Image via Wikipedia After Google shutdown their office in Phoenix, now its DHL turn. DHL shutdown its office on 92nd street. Lot of sources indicates that, its going to shutdown its Scottsdale data center which effects its 925 employees. There is no official word from DHL on this news yet, but in August DHL laid off 105 employees, or 11 percent, of its Scottsdale Airpark data center workforce as part of the global company's pullback from the U.S. market. DHL had employed 925 people at the Scottsdale center and began reducing that number in the past few weeks.

However, I believe the rumors of closing down the entire Scottsdale facility is true. I believe that all the employees notified internally. As an indication to this - someone named 'shebrakes' from Scottsdale posted this on the Indeed forum:

The Scottsdale facilities are going to be shut down by summer 2009. They will ask a few people if they want to move to the DHL Florida headquarters. They have been laying people off in phases to prepare for this. Most everyone will be let go by April/May. Customers are leaving DHL in droans as they are fed up with DHL. DHL is loosing over $500m a day. Had they left the Airborne people in charge vs. firing all of them, they would be making money today. The 'good old boys' club at DHL did a royal job of screwing up the integration of Airborne due to their greed and ignorance.

I believe this guy must be ex Airborne guy who feels DHL would have been survived under Airborne management. I can't speak on DHL internal things, but I read on lots of forums - DHL employees complaining about the management and lack of communication between employees and management. Whatever, the ship is sinking, no point on arguing who is the blame for.

Liquidation company truck outside the DHL office loading all the DHL furniture, computers on Tuesday, day after layoffs. Taken by using mobile phone.

American Express - 7,000 layoffs:
Highlighting that even some of the most creditworthy and wealthiest Americans are having trouble paying their bills, American Express said that it is cutting 10% of its staff, suspending management salary increases, cut 7000 jobs, mostly in management, and plans to freeze hiring. AmEx wants to save $1.8 billion next year. Makes sense, since the company lost half its market value and saw third-quarter profit decline 23%. The company also had to set aside $1.4 billion for loan losses.

Motorola - another 3,000 layoffs after 2,600 layoffs in April:
The maker of communications gear said it would slash 3,000 jobs by April, with about 2,000 of them coming from the cellphone unit. The Schaumburg, Ill., company last announced 2,600 job cuts in April. Motorola lost $397 million, or 18 cents a share, in the July-to-September period.

Watson Wyatt Survey - One in Four Companies Planning Layoffs:
As the impact of the global economic crisis takes hold, a quarter of U.S. employers expect to make layoffs in the next 12 months. However, most companies are focusing on increased employee communication and smaller cost-saving measures, according to a survey by Watson Wyatt, a leading global consulting firm.

More layoffs:
GM & Chrysler merger could cut 74,000 jobs. Xerox laid off 3,000 jobs, Qwest - 1200, Symantec - 800, Gannett - 3000, Time Inc -600, Amdocs - 500, Electronic Arts - 600 and this section keeps going if I mention all the companies that announced layoffs.

Let's check the homes.

Good news:
The September report from the Census Bureau finds new home sales inched up 2.7 percent from August to an annualized rate of 464,000. Despite the gain, sales are down 33 percent from September 2007, and far below the pace during the boom years.

Bad News:
The median sales price fell to $218,400, down 9.1% in the past year. It's the lowest median sales price in four years. Itis the same price as 2004. Its because, U.S. home builders took a big step in September toward reducing the gigantic oversupply of homes, boosting sales slightly, slashing prices and reducing the number of unsold homes at a record pace.

Worse news:
One in every 475 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in September. In September alone, around 750,000 people are in the process of putting their home into Foreclosures. Guess what happens once these homes are in the market? Home prices will fall further.

How about valley Foreclosures:
RealtyTrac’s U.S. Foreclosure Market Report shows Arizona in September had the fourth highest foreclosure rate, and the fourth highest total number of foreclosure filings of any state. Foreclosure filings — which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 265,968 U.S. properties in September.

Valley home prices - 30% decrease in the last year, Phoenix tops the nation:

Tail piece:
I guess you don't need to see some one in Halloween costume to get scared!!! Aren't you scared with the numbers? Either way Happy Halloween and happy weekend!!!

For latest technical information, follow me @ http://twitter.com/harigottipati.
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Yeah, its Friday! What do you expect these days?

2008-10-17T18:47:00.000-07:00

Roller coaster ride
I was at Disneyland for the labor day long weekend and the roller coaster ride at Disneyland was so fun. Indeed, we went back to the same ride again in the evening as one of my friend missed(due to Daddy's day care) the ride in the morning. It was fun riding the roller coaster. Nevertheless, it wasn't fun when Wall Street riding the roller coaster. Particularly today, it's going up and down with so many bumps/fluctuations.

Around 10 AM I checked Forbes.com, headline shows the market was down.
10:02 AM, I checked Marketwatch, headline shows the market is up.
10:05 AM, CNNMoney shows the market is down.
10:10 AM, thestreet.com shows the market is up.

I know some sites updates the news so fast and some don't. But, these 4 sites are pretty fast at providing the updated information about the Wall Street. Why each site is different? Because the market is going up and down and changing every minute with the huge difference. Imagine how stock holder feels when Wall Street rides the roller coaster. Its not fun, stock holders will get heart attack for the fluctuations like this. Not just today, the whole week is like this to weak the market further.

10:30 AM, I was talking to a friend, and we happened to talk about the market. He mentioned that he lost 25K in last 2 months on stock. He is like a next door Joe and lost 25K in 2 months. Just close you eyes and imagine how much money wiped out on the Wall Street. You get the idea.

Oil tanked to $70 from a record high of $140+. Gold dropped to $770 from a record high of $1000+.

When I wrote about the crisis last time, I mentioned about the layoffs in coming days. Some opinioned that I am over thinking, but I am not. Can you think how many companies announced layoffs since that day?

Layoffs, layoffs, pink slips.... everywhere like the Bank of America ATMs commercial:

October 2008 will be remembered in the history for the worst financial turmoil, layoffs. Here is the partial list(these are just I came across.... God knows how many layoffs out there in the wild):

GM to lay off 1200 in metro Detroit, 1600 total.
Jaxtr, the VOIP company laid off 50 of its employees this evening.
Zillow, the online real estate which provides house values, house sale information laid off 25 of the employees this morning.
Pandora, online music radio laid off 15 off this morning.
Appcelerator closed its Atlanta office Wednesday and laid off all from that office.
Hi5, the third-largest social network, confirmed Thursday that it laid off "10 to 15 percent"
Business social-software maker Jive Software reportedly laid off 35 of its workforce Tuesday.
Sirius XM announced Thursday that it laid off 50 on-air and off-air employees in its Washington, D.C., office.
Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, laid off 20 percent of its employees earlier this week.
Tesla Motors announced Wednesday that it will lay off its entire Detroit office staff.
AdBrite, the "Web's online ad marketplace," announced that it laid off 40 percent of its staff.
Zivity, which lets people vote on the best adult pictures has laid off 33 of its staff.
Last Friday, Seesmic, a video microblog, announced that it laid off 30 of the employees.
Searchme laid off 20 of its force.
eBay laid off 1500 employees earlier this month.
Alcoa prepares to lay off 660 at Texas smelter.
India's Jet Airways cuts 1900 jobs to cut costs.
DBS Group(Singapore's biggest bank) joint venture Cholamandalam DBS Finance to close 75 branches in India and layoff staff.
Invista to lay off 400 people at Delaware nylon plant
King County(Seattle) to slash 400 jobs 10
PepsiCo profit misses view, to cut 3300 jobs.
Daimler to Close Sterling Trucks Unit, Cut 3,500 Jobs
In Sweden - Foxconn considers to lay off 90,000 people.
Ford expects to lay off 792 at Chicago plant.
Federal Reserve Bank to lay off 57 in Jacksonville.
Whirlpool Corp. plans to lay off 440 employees at IOWA plant.
200 DeKalb County(Atalanta) school system employees face layoff.
Volvo Cars To Lay Off Another 3300 Employees
Ford to curb German production - lay off 204.
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said he would lay off 567 state employees.
United Airlines to lay off 414 mechanics at its San Francisco maintenance base - part of 7,000 job eliminations announced previously.
Brunswick plans to shut 4 plants, lay off 1,400 workers as boating market continues to sour.
Fleetwood to lay off 325 Pennsylvania workers by Dec.
Kmart to Lay Off 300 at Greensboro, Burlington Stores.
HP announced 25,000 layoffs with EDS merge
Bear Stearns announced 7,000 lafoffs.
Lehman brothers - 20,000 layoffs
HBOS may layoff all 40,000 employess as a result of merger with Lloyds TSB
Schering-Plough -1,000 layoffs
Micron closing flash memory production facility in Boise, Idaho and laying off 1500 people.

No jobs?
There are jobs, but there are lot of people who are searching for the jobs. As Google decided to close down the Phoenix office, we decided to have job expo/fair/meet for them with the recruiters on behalf of Phoenix Java User group. I talked to one recruiter today about the fair, and during the conversation he mentioned that he has 5 Java openings. Therefore, the market is not dry, just loaded with the layoff people. Getting a job is not easy, unless you are unique, different from others, smart etc. If you are regular Java Joe, you may have tough time. If you happened to be a hands-on and up-to-date with the latest technologies, you will get a job in a week. Let me put this way - you are a Java developer working on server side in a company A from last 5 years and the project is not using the latest tools or the company A is outsourcing all the development to company B in India, and you are leading the outsource team - the chances are less for you to get the job in this turmoil. I am afraid that your job search is limited to the companies which are outsourcing the development. If you are hands-on developer and your last project is using the latest tools/frameworks like Hibernate, JPS, Spring, Struts, JSF, Ajax(as a example I am mentioning Java, for other technologies the tools/frameworks are different) - you will definitely get the job in a week to month as most of the jobs out there needs these expertise.

Be SMART!!!

Survival tips:
As a continuation to my previous tips, here are some tips came in email - floating between the Indian techies. One of my friend forwarded the email around 11:30 AM. Here is the email as it is:

"To make you believe the software giant such as EDS,CTS,INFOSYS,TCS,WIPRO,SATYAM have already announced that there will be no salary hike or appraisal for the year and lot of employees have already been put into the bench.

Make your own judgment, don't panic! Do what is wise.

1. Don't take any loans; buy homes, properties with loans, or even cash. Keep as much cash as possible.
2. Pay off as much of personal loans, private loans, as debt collection will be hastened.
3. Sell any stocks you can even at lower prices.
4. Take money off from Trust Funds.
5. Don't believe in huge sales forecast from customers, be extremely prudent, lowest inventories, reduce liabilities.
6. Don't invest in new capital.
7. If you are selling homes/ properties/ cars, do it now, when you can get good prices, they are going to fall.
8. Don't invest in new business proposals.
9. Cancel holiday plans using credit cards.
10. Don't change jobs, as companies will retrench based on 'last in first out'. Stay cool, wait, and if you took all of the above actions and more, you probably will be better off than many. This is not a rumor.
Bear Stearns is the first of many banking and financial institutions that will start falling in the not too future. If Bear Stearns can fall, so can JP Morgan , Citibank, HSBC, and the whole world. US economy falls, the rest will crumble.
India and all those self economies will be the most protected, but not gullible. Europe may be a little stronger, but not China, another giant place! Malaysia will see significant impact. "

Update: This news just came in. India's Jet airways abandoned layoff plans.

Update 2: Mervyns closing its doors. Mervyns, the California-based department store that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July, announced that it planned to hold going-out-of-business sales at its remaining 149 locations. Go, grab the final clearance sale before it closes doors.

Update 3: Linens ’n Things, the home goods retailer that filed for bankruptcy protection in the spring, announced on Tuesday its own plans to liquidate.

Update 4: One of my friend emailed that valley based eCorridor also laid off some of its employees. Don't have the number with me. I will update once I get more details.

Weather alert: Cyclone Wall Street turning into Tsunami. Be prepared!!!

2008-10-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last week analysts predicted - Dow Jones will hit 8000 points by end of the year. After reading that I asked one of my friend "do you really think it will be by end of the year, I feel like its by end of this month - perhaps by end of the week". Wall Street is beating the analyst predictions, not caring the bail out package/interest rate cuts. Monday it started like a Cyclone and by end of the week it turned into a big Tsunami. Its wiped out 2000 points and lots of companies/people lost their value/money in one week. It could be the worst nightmare for the stock investors. But wait.... what about the post tsunami effect? After a cyclone it will take a few weeks to go back to the normal life. However, we can't easily resume the normal life after Wall Street tsunami. In case of tsunami, there are insurance companies to cover the damage up to some extent. Nevertheless, in the case of Wall Street tsunami, the banks/insurance companies got wiped out. Furthermore, this tsunami is hitting all over the world, not just one country. If it is in one country, other countries will help the effected area. This tsunami is different and there is no recovery in near future, yes there is no recovery in near feature.

Google market value is currently under 100B and Microsoft is under 200B. RIM dropped to 30B from 80B in just 3 months and the list goes on. See how much money/value is wiped out in one week? Its unbelievable. Take any company, the value of the company went down drastically. The debt in US is beyond 10 trillions. The US debt clock is running out of the digits to display the debt as it is designed to display less than 10 trillions. They never expected this number. Now they are planning to replace the clock :-)

The mess

Instead of explaining the mess, let's look at the pictures(Pictures from Sequoia capital presentation of Doom):

Home prices soared in last few years

Too many homes built as the demand is high

Wage growth down, no savings - can't afford the home

The recovery

Unexpected drop in business activity: SAP

Market fell sharply and recovery will be long. Recovery is not like "V" - no come back as fast as it fell.

Be prepared

The recovery is going to be very longer, so maximize your savings. Your job may not exist tomorrow, cut down all the unnecessary expenses. Keep the money to face the unexpected.
Analysts predicted that this year holiday shopping is going to drop and few will be in the line for thanksgiving sale. Minimize the shopping and save the money. Having plans to buy LCD/Plasma TV for thanksgiving? Think twice about it.
Thinking of investing in stocks as the stocks dipped? Don't know whether this is the right time!!! What if the stock still plunges? But wait for the next week - lot of companies announcing the 3rd quarter results in the next week. Wall street already lowered the numbers/expectations on all companies and the stock plunged as per the expectations. By the end of next week we will know whether Wall street reacted too much or the companies going to announce as Wall street expected! Either way, be cautious to invest in stocks in the financial crisis.
Thinking of buying home? You will get the best deals as foreclosures are increasing. Wait!!! The foreclosures in the current market are due to bad loans. Since the wall street is melted down, soon lots of people loose their jobs. If there is no job, then there is no house loan payment. Consequently, the good loans also cause foreclosures due to the layoffs. Therefore, we might see "Foreclosure Tsunami". Want to nab the best deal out there now or want to wait for the foreclosure tsunami?
Social life will be limited to home food and home entertainment to cut down the expenses. That means shops, restaurants, bars, pubs, night clubs, movie theaters, amusement parks will see the sales dipping and might go out of the business.
IT companies will revise the budgets. Expect budget cuts and job cuts in each company, I mean every single company.
Watch out contractors - you are the one to get effected first due to the higher pay rate and to avoid the severance pay for full time employees.
Big budgeted projects, revamping(re-designing) projects will go on hold or halted forever. So it effects all big companies like Microsoft(for OS software), SUN/DELL/HP(for hardware), SAP/Oracle(for ERP software) etc.
If you are in a start-up, be prepared to see company closing doors on one Friday.
Be prepared for the worst - even though you feel your job is safe, be cautious - it appears to be safe - back there in the corner meeting rooms there will be meeting going on to exercise the necessary steps to cut down the budgets/head counts.
Be prepared to take the extra load as your colleague job may be terminated next week and his work is going to fall on you. Be prepared to work independently as your lead/manager might be gone next week as your company may adopt IBM concept "cut down middle management - make flat teams" for cost savings.
And finally - be preapred to face the Friday. Could be layoffs, company shutting doors, merger with another company etc. Watchout... it could happen on Monday too.

Overall, its going to be the worst of worsts.

Google closing Phoenix office and financial melt down, layoffs in numbers

2008-09-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

Google logo inside Tempe office

The Valley takes another financial hit, as Google announces it will close its Phoenix(Tempe) office on November 21st. Well bad economy, financial crisis, layoffs can even shake the gaints like Goolge too. Fifty jobs will be affected, but Google plans to offer those people positions at other offices, including one in California (if the employess willing to move!). Well, its better than this cartoon:-)

When Google opened the office in 2006, they announced that the company has bigger plans and every one expected the number of jobs will be substantial. With in 2 years, Google took U turn and decided to shut down Phoenix office by November 21, 2008. The closure is the latest of several offices closing down. The company announced plans in July to close offices in Denver and Dallas. My reliable source(disclosure: based on the info I have) indicates that Google has plans to shut down all the offices except in Bay area, New York and Seattle. If that is correct, the next on the list are:
• Georgia - Atlanta
• Illinois - Chicago
• Iowa - Council Bluffs
• Massachusetts - Boston/Cambridge
• Michigan - Ann Arbor
• Michigan - Detroit
• North Carolina - Lenoir
• Oklahoma - Pryor
• Oregon - The Dalles
• Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh
• South Carolina - Charleston
• Texas - Austin
• Washington D.C.
Good luck valley Googlers! Hope you guys find positions elsewhere in Google.

On the same note: Financial melt down in numbers

Last year, lot of people said that we were in bubble. But I wrote in June 2008 that we are at the beginning of the bad economy(read here) and I kept saying that the worst is yet to be seen and possibly by end of 2008 or beginning of the 2009. This week financial mess indicates that its going to be true. Newyork Times put down the interactive graph on the financial melt down. In last 12 months US lost 4 trillion(4000 billion) dollards. Some of them are:
AIG lost 148 Billion
CitiGroup 139B
Bank of America 86B
Wachovia 68B
Fannie Mae 64B
Freddie Mac 41B
Merrill Lynch: 39B
Goldman Sachs: 36B
Morgan Stanley: 33B
Lehman Brothers: 32B
American Express: 29B
Washington Mutual: 28B

Layoffs in numbers

So far the financial companies laid off 49,000 employees. Below are some numbers by company:
HP announced 25,000 layoffs with EDS merge
Bear Stearns-7,000
Lehman-20,000
HBOS may layoff all 40,000 employess as a result of merger with Lloyds TSB
Schering-Plough -1,000
Ebay - 1,500(not announced, based on my source)

Effect on offshore too

Satyam laid off 1500 jobs on the same day Lehman Brothers collpased as Lehman Brotheres is one of the biggest client for Satyam.
Wipro - 3,000(not announced, based on my reliable source)
and many more....

Tail piece(Humor)

Chad Fowler wrote a book "My job went to India.. All I got is this lousy book!" - which explains how to save your job. You can buy it here.

Bad economy, Layoffs.... what jobs are hot?

2008-09-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

You don't beleive this! Testing jobs are in demand than any jobs and .Net jobs are beating Java. Very interesting!!! Take a look at Indeed job trends graph:

Java Job trends

2008-09-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to do quick search on Indeed to see what Java technologies can get you the job in this bad economy :-) I am little surprised to see Spring MVC way below Struts and below JSF. Are you surprised? Share your surprises in the comments below.

Java

Java Web Frameworks

Java Persistence frameworks

Java Application Servers

How NBCOlympics.com is surviving with 1 million streams a day? By not using the Cloud Computing, the LimeLightNetworks way

2008-08-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

With the massive video streaming, NBCOlympics.com is not melting down the interenet. Working nearly flawless by not jumping onto Cloud computing. Wondering how it is handling the massive bandwidth without the Cloud? Here comes: LimeLightNetworks, Tempe, AZ based company(NASDAQ listed: LLNW) is behind the NBCOlympics.com. I came to know about this company in 2006 and last year I heard from a reliable source saying that Microsoft is trying out LimeLigthNetworks for its MSNBC site. The results were impressive and the cost was relatively cheaper compared to Akamai(Dsiclousre: Its not a official statement by any company. Its the information based on my source). At 2008 Microsoft Technology Summit, Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight plug-in(Flash killer) with NBCOlympics.com site and mentioned that Akamai handles the content caching, but last month NBC announced that streaming video on NBCOlympics.com is handled by LimeLightNetworks. LimeLightNetworks caches the content at ISPs as opposed to caching at data centers like the Akamai way. Its completely off the cloud. Eery one started talking about the issues with Cloud computing lately(Amazon EC2 and S3 outage, Goolge Apps down etc), but NBCOlympics.com is growing every day in terms of page views, unique visitors, number of streaming videos by going off the cloud. Here are the NBCOlympics.com statistics for Aug 12th:

As of Aug 12th, 4:30 p.m. ET 1.1 million video streams of Aug 11th’s historic 4×100m relay have been accessed at NBCOlympics.com, making it the most watched video ever from the site. NBCOlympics.com on MSN continued its dominance on Sunday with 66.7 million page views, 5.1 million unique users and more than 3.4 million video streams. Through three days NBCOlympics.com has totaled 199.3 million page views. By the day’s end NBCOlympics.com will have surpassed the total page views for the entire 2004 Athens Games (229.9 million). NBCOlympics.com’s total video streams to date are 11.1 million, which is five times more than the total for the entire Athens Games (2.2 million).

On Aug 13th:

Online unique users jumped from 4.2 million on Friday (5.7% of the Olympic audience) to 7.8 million (7.6% of the audience) on Monday. NBCOlympics.com in the first four days saw 373.9 million page views and 17.7 million video streams, which works out to roughly one video stream per 20 page views. NBC research shows that 40% of NBCOlympics.com users surveyed utilized the VOD to view what they had already seen. Unique viewers jumped 85% on Monday to 2 million. The increase is tied in part to the at-work audience, which is in front of a computer instead of a TV during the workday. NBCOlympics.com saw 4.7 million unique visitors on Monday, up from 2.6 million on the opening day. There were 1.7 million video streams for Sunday night’s U.S.-winning 400-meter freestyle relay race

How LimeLightNetworks handling the massive traffic and how it differs from the No.1 content caching provider Akamai? Jason Perlow at ZDNet explains:

When you download videos from NBCOlympics.com, your computer isn’t actually going to the Internet to get content. In fact, the content is usually no more than 2 router hops away from your ISP. Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide (such as Verizon, Comcast, Road Runner and Optimum Online/Cablevision) so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP’s main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP’s internal network. In most cases, you’re never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video. Slick, isn’t it?

So how does all that content get there? Live HD video feeds from the Olympics venues are delivered via optical link to NBC’s International Broadcast Centre in Beijing. The Hi-Def signal is then transcoded/downgraded to 480i video resolution using a special CISCO Scientific Atlanta video encoding appliance solution and sent over trans-continental Optical Carrier to NBC Studios in Los Angeles, and then to NBC’s broadcast center in 30 Rockefeller Plaza (”30 Rock”) in New York City where the encoding to Windows Media Format (WMF) takes place. Via short haul Optical Carrier connection, the Windows Media files are then distributed to Limelight Networks’ primary East Coast replicated data center in New York, and then on to the operations center in Tempe, which replicates all 3000+ hours of Olympics video to its global network of ISP co-located data centers and is queued for media streaming at the very edge your local ISP’s network (see network trace screen shot above). To the end user, this is all transparent, and it just plain works.

LimeLigthNetworks operations center in Tempe - photo gallery.

Also Jaosn concludes "flawless operation of the live video streaming from NBCOlympics.com over the last week is proof that localized content caching technology works". If this works flawlessly throughout the Olympics, I am sure people are going to jump off the Cloud and use the localized content cache. Its interesting to see how the buzz transforms from Cloud to local cotnent cache.

Silverlight success

For Microsoft, its a big win in terms of Silverlight. NBCOlympics.com is completely powered by Silverlight technology and its huge for Microsoft in terms of show casing it on a site which has a lot of traction. As NBCOlypmics.com is running smoothly with the massive traffic, the part of the credit goes to Silverlight technology. As I mentioned earlier, I beleive Silverlight is going to give tough competetion to Adobe Flash technology. Now its a time for Sun to prove its Flash killer - Java FX which is barely embraced by web developers.

One million Zoho users and counting - Thanks to Google/Yahoo login integration

2008-08-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Zoho, the onlie office suite is going to announce tomorrow that they hit the one million user mark. For Zoho, its definitely an acheivement and they deserve this. With the small team and operations being in India, they are doing marvelous job here in US. They compete with Google, MSN and many power players in online office game. Here is the chart showing the user registrations. If you notice, the peak was in May. That was when they opened up Zoho for Google & Yahoo users.

Though Zoho has been known for the Office Suite with 17 applications, the two Apps that were silently successful for them have been Zoho CRM & Zoho Creator. Zoho CRM has 10% (100K) of users with a good percentage of paid users and Zoho Creator has been a quiet success with over 130K applications. The company refused to reveal the paid user numbers.

Zoho Business and Zoho Mail are on the way
There are two important apps currently in private beta - Zoho Business and Zoho Mail. These two applications will be open to public in coming weeks/months and are going to play an important role going forward for Zoho. Lately Zoho is busy integrating and enhancing their existing applications. They are also planning to add more apps to the Zoho Suite by the end of the year.

iPhone 3G on July 11th in 22 countires

2008-06-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

Photo credit:Engadget

iPhone 3G is announced just now at WWDC08. Here are some quick details:
Built in gps
Full enterprise support
Powerpoint too.. nice
25 countries in the next few months..
They also rebranded.. .mac account to mobileme..and it will be sync up everywhere..
70 countries this year
Pricing is : $199 for 8GB, $299 for 16GB.
The 16 Gig is a white phone.
Launching on July 11th in 22 countries at once.
Pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and Treo 750
Much faster than old EDGE data.
Battery life : 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio.

Again on July 11th lots of crowd is going to be lined up in front of the Apple and AT&T stores. Are you going to be in the line?

Kiran Mudiam rambling: Wall street is not happy with the news and Apple stock keeps falling(lost $8 so far) since the announcement. He opinions that Stock is falling because of the price. The 3G phone price is at $199 and with the weakened dollar it will be cheaper in other countries, so it effects the revenue.

Amazon.com is down for 90 minutes, roughly 3 million loss in revenues(updated)

2008-06-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

The online retailer gaint Amazon.com is down from 10:24 AM MST. An Amazon.com customer-service representative said the site wouldn't be fully functional for another one or two hours. She said the outage was due to an upgrade of the company's Web site, but didn't provide further details. The site is partially up after a while and still some of the services are down. Amazon has had outages before, though rarely. In 2004, the site was down for four or five hours, in the midst of year-end holiday shopping season. A two-hour outage hit in 2006.

As of this writing its still down and below is the current screen shot of Amazon.com.

Update:By 12:10 PM MST, Amazon.com is up and running. Not sure whether its a partial restore or complete.

Update 2: Based on an average loss of $31,000 per minute, Amazon lost around $3 million

Beginning of the bad economy: Layoffs rose, Highest Unemployment, Weakened US Dollar, Record Oil price, Record foreclosures, Global food crisis

2008-06-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

Are you prepared to face the worst economy? The worst has yet to be happen, we are at the beginning!!!

Layoffs, Unemployment
Today is the one of the worst days in U.S economy. Labor department announced unemployment rate rose by the most in more than two decades. The U.S. lost jobs for a fifth month and jobless rate increased by half a point to 5.5 percent. Payrolls(lay offs) fell by 49,000 in May and Economists had projected payrolls would drop by 60,000 after a previously reported 20,000 decline the prior month. This weakened the dollar in international market and Stock market effected so badly. As of this writing Dow Jones lost 300 points, highest in a day recently and Gold price rose more than $20 to $899.14. The good news here in Arizona is, even though the national unemployment rate jumped from 5.0 percent in April to 5.5 percent in May, Arizona's unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in both April and May.

Oil price
Crude oil rose more than $9 to a record as the dollar weakened after the U.S. unemployment rate grew the most in two decades and Morgan Stanley said prices may reach $150 within a month. Crude oil rose $9.54, or 7.5 percent, to $137.33 a barrel at 1:20 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange after touching a record $137.70. Prices rose as much as 7.8 percent, the biggest one-day gain since Dec. 26, 1991.

Another reason for the spike in crude oil price was Israel decision to attack Iran. Shaul Mofaz, Israel's transportation minister and a contender for the post of prime minister, told the Yediot Ahronot daily newspaper that Israel will have to attack Iran if it doesn't abandon its nuclear-development program.

Housing market - Foreclosures
Also the foreclosure rate is rapidly increasing across the nation and more than a million homes in foreclosure first time in US history. The bad news here in Arizona is, its one of the state which tops foreclosures.

California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada have been hit by a hangover after a home building boom in the middle of the decade, which was fueled by rising home prices and investors snatching up real estate using risky mortgages. Those four states have nearly 400,000 homes in foreclosure, or a third of the nationwide total. Roughly 3.6% of all of the loans in these states are now in foreclosure.

Due to the bad economy lot of crowd in Sellers lane, but less noise in Buyers Road.

Food prices
Food prices soaring across the globe and NPR(National Public Radio) says its a silent Tsunami. The skyrocketing commodity prices are causing hunger around the world.
Credit: Times Magazine. Read the times story on food crisis.

How to survive?
Having all together its a beginning of the bad economy and we are going to face the tough time down the road. As I always say the worst has yet to be seen, but today I can say that we are at the beginning of that. Are you ready for the bumpy ride? If not, here are few tips for the bumpy ride:

If you are laid off in the recession, here are the 17 tips to find a new job by famous blogger Robert Scoble : What to do if you’re laid off in 2008 recession.

Survival Tips and List: Though I don't think you need to go for hunting for food with Knives, some of the tips are really valuable in this list. For ex: keep your job as long as possible, buy gold coins etc.

For investors, Ten resolutions that will help you survive the coming bear-recession market.

If you are driving back from work between 5PM to 6PM, tune to your local NPR station(91.5FM KJZZ in Phoenix) for "Food crisis-survival tips" everyday in "All things considered" program or you can read the stories later here. Read the yesterdays story which talks about how bad economy is effecting poor, middle class and even upper middle class people here in U.S.

What do you say? Share your thoughts or surviving tips in the comments.
Update:By evening, Dow Jones fell nearly 400 points. Its even worser than I thought.

T-Mobile introdcues flat-rate family plans

2008-06-04T11:50:00.001-07:00

FierceWireless reports that T-Mobile USA is upping the ante on the flat-rate plans by debuting a family-unlimited combo plan that offers unlimited nationwide calling, text, picture and instant messaging for a flat-rate. The first line costs $99.99 per month and each additional line costs $49.99 per month. Customers can add up to four additional lines. That means that a family of five would pay about $300 plus taxes and fees for an unlimited family plan from T-Mobile.

Why cant Silverlight beat Flash? Java FX is out of the race!

2008-05-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

Its better to look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/serverunleashed/default.html instead of me explaining it.
Its powerful as Flash. What about Java FX in this race? Well you can feel your self at www.javafx.com. Its not even close to what Flash and Silverlight is providing. Assuming Java FX is out of the race, the real competition is going to be between Flash and Silverlight only. Lets wait and see whether Silverlight can take over Flash or not?

SAP is finally coming to your phones with native apps

2008-05-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

SAP is pushing its mobile application server from a long time, but no one has really used or customized it for the mobile phones. Perhaps, 2 days back SAP pushed NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 SP3 Trial Version to developers to play around. Its been doing that from a long time, but no developer has focused on developing the SAP mobile solutions as SAP is bulky and its very difficult to customize the complex enterprise solutions for small foot print devices. As devices are becoming smarter and powerful these days(even Apple is turning iPhone into enterprise device with Exchange email support), finally SAP is seeing some light in mobile space. As their Software As A Service model(SAAS) dubbed as SAP Business ByDesing is taking the slow road towards the expectations, now the company is betting in mobile space.

In a surprise announcement, SAP said it is delevering native CRM application(thin client) for BlackBerry devices as opposed to the mobile browser accessing the Netweaver Mobile Server for the data. Sure, Blackberry is completely occupied the enterprise space, so it makes sense for SAP to choose BlackBerry. Since many executives and business professional hands are already on BlackBerry for day to day business activity, SAP can easily reach them by choosing BlackBerry platform.

SAP will demonstrate a CRM application(not the demoware, real application) that's been "merged" with BlackBerry e-mail, address book and calendar applications, at its annual Sapphire user conference in Orlando next week.

Under the deal with BlackBerry, SAP will develop its applications for RIM. Key benefits are:

* Expanded Reach of SAP® Business Suite Applications -- Users rely on their BlackBerry smartphones for access to people and information on the go, so it becomes easier to introduce new enterprise applications with a far greater adoption rate.

* Automated Data Synchronization -- The new solution leverages the push-based architecture of BlackBerry® Enterprise Server to automate data synchronization between business systems and mobile applications. BlackBerry smartphone users have the flexibility to use the mobile enterprise application even in the absence of network coverage. Once back in coverage, all updates queued on the handset and back-end servers are automatically transferred without user action, similar to how e-mail on BlackBerry smartphones works today.

* Easy Deployment -- The mobile device management capabilities of BlackBerry Enterprise Server allow IT groups to centrally manage and wirelessly deploy mobile applications to BlackBerry smartphones.

* Market-Leading Enterprise-Class Security -- The proven capability and demonstrated track record from SAP in enterprise applications security, combined with the renowned wireless security of the BlackBerry platform, helps ensure enterprise-class security for the end-to-end solution.

* Low Incremental Cost of Ownership -- Businesses that have already deployed BlackBerry Enterprise Server and SAP applications can leverage their existing investments and keep deployment and maintenance costs at a minimum.

Technical details from ZD net, Between the lines Blog

* SAP CRM application will be the first to run native on the BlackBerry smartphone and integrate with RIM’s email, address and calendar apps. Companies that already have SAP’s CRM apps for the BlackBerry will “require only basic user training and minimal incremental IT infrastructure investments.”

* RIM will enhance its framework for building workflow-enabled apps. Once this framework is in place more SAP applications will be available on the BlackBerry. * Data will be synchronized via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server automatically.

* Deployments will be centrally managed and companies that already have BlackBerry Enterprise Server and SAP apps can use their existing infrastructure.

Its good to see SAP is finally going to work on your handhelds(CRM for now), but the question remains is how comfortable businesses will feel making proprietary business data more easily accessible with wireless networks and mobile devices. Knowing Blackberry outages, can enterprise rely on Blackberry to access the enterprise data when they needed? May be or may be not! But isn't it convinient to access the data on go (on your handheld with 99.99% of the time, with 0.01% network outages) instead of going to home/office and access the data on PC?

SAP community, whats your opinion on this? Sahre your thoughts in comments.

'Future of the internet' whie paper

2008-05-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

A detailed white paper on "Future of the Internet" is available from www.futureoftheinternet.org website. It covered a lot of topics with real time instances and it also covered the topic "lost data" where they have given instance of my O'Reilly blog post - GMail Disaster, Google confirmed the Mass Email Deletions. Even backups are gone?. Its a lengthy white paper, go through it in your spare time.

Project Capuchin - Enhance your Java mobile application UI with Flash Lite

2008-04-30T21:42:00.000-07:00

As Flash’s strength is in UI development and Java’s strength is in services, security and distribution, lots of Java developers are adopting the Flash as their UI choice. When it comes Java ME development, its an application sitting on the mobile phones as opposed to traditional web application where the browser and server are involved. Until now, Java ME developers have only Java ME GUI APIs for UI development, but now they can enhance the UI with Flash technology. In an interesting turn of events, Sony Ericsson launching project Capuchin, which bridges the Java ME with Flash Lite by empowering these two distinct developer communities to bring their respective expertise to create more powerful mobile applications. Read more from my original post at O'Reilly OnJava blog.

Tech News Watch - 04-23-2008

2008-04-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

T-Mobile preparing to ship first Google Inc.'s Android platform

Despite of competetion, Google allows Zoho to use Google accounts to sign into Zoho

Google's Free Food Budget: $7,530 Per Googler, $72 Million A Year

Amazon.com Announces First Quarter Sales up 37% to $4.1 Billion

Apple in Q2: Mac Sales Soar, iPod Sales Slow

DOJ Investigating Yahoo-Google Ad Test and a call between Google CEO and Yahoo CEO after Microsoft offer to Yahoo

Sun Microsystems will be removing the last restrictions on Java to make it completely open source

Twitter lead architect(who tasked with scaling Twitter) Blaine Cook left the company. Fired or resigned?

Twitter for Japan with ads - finally ads on Twitter

Windows Live Mesh launched - much better than AllPeers

2008-04-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

As Ray Ozzie hinted at Microsoft’s Mix conference, last night Microsoft launched Windows Live Mesh. Mesh is a centralized service which lets your PCs(soon Macs) and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to any application, any data you want. All your devices can work together with the Mesh once you install the Mesh application on your device. Currently it supports only Windows based PCs and devices, but with the Live Mesh for Developer(SDK and API) we will eventually see the Mesh porting to different platform/devices.

No more e-mailing photos, attachments or any file to yourself or buddies or colleagues. With Mesh, you can synchronize the information you need across all your devices and the data will be at hand when you need them - at home, at the office, and on the go. With Live Mesh, access to all your devices—and any programs on those devices—is at your fingertips, from anywhere.

Live Desktop - 5GB free storage
Live Desktop comes with 5 GB of free storage, and can be used from most of the todays web browsers. With Live Desktop it is easy to sync and access folders from the web. You can also connect to remote PCs from your Live Desktop.

Sharing is easy
Invite friends, family to a folder and everyone is kept up to date because files can be synchronized automatically with all your devices and all their devices.

AllPeers vs Live Mesh
Though similar technology AllPeers shutdown their product recently, Live Mesh has potential to embraced by the crowd as it is beyond AllPeers. AllPeers was only designed to work in Firefox web browser, but Live Mesh is beyond the browser. It works on any PC and on any device.

Windows Live messenger widget

2007-11-07T11:12:00.000-08:00

Today Windows live messenger team released the IM widget that can be placed anywhere. Go to http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/websettings.aspx and enable teh feature. From Create HTML link select the messenger icon and get the code. You can place the code anywhere you want. Below is the Windows Live IM widget.

Google adsense hack : Make adsense(page impressions) money without displaying the ads

2006-09-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was working on some thing where I needed to hide iframe based on some action. I figured it out putting the iframe inside div tag and hiding the div tag is very easy. And then I realised that Google adsense uses iframe to display the ads and wanted to see how Google prevents me fectching the ads into a hidden iframe. There is no way(as of now) for Google to determine whether the iframe is hidden or not as I am using div wrapper around iframe to hide it.

Its very simple. Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag which displays the text or image ads. If you put the Google adsense script inside a div tag and if you hide the div tag, users won't even notice the Google ads. But it actually loads the ads from Google servers into the iframe. It only works with page impression option, because Goolge count the number of impressions each time you load the ads into iframe. I dont think Google has the mechanism to check whether the user is displaying the ads that loaded from Google server or not. Its very difficult for Google to determine this case as iframe itself is not hidden, it is used inside div tag which is hidden.

For example, you don't see the Google ads below the link "Click to show Google ads". But by this time the ads are loaded into the iframe that is hidden inside div tag. Just click on the link, it will display the hidden Google ads.

Click to hide Google Ads

Update 09/25/06 : Initially I made the above ads hidden and clciking on the link will show up the ads, but it seems that I am violating the Google adsenses policies by hiding ads by default. Thats why now I am showing the ads by default and clicking on the link will hide the ads. I guess this is not violating the policies as I am showing them to the user, but user can turn them off. As per page impression policies I am showing them to the user and user may not click on it.

Here is the email that I received from Google on violating the adsense policies:
Hello Hari,

We regularly review sites in the AdSense program for compliance with our program policies.

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that we've noted that you are in violation of AdSense program policies on http://harikrishna.blogspot.com/.

We've found that Google ads are being hidden by the div tags on your site. Google AdSense publishers may not display our ads in ways that cause the ads to be obscured. Please modify your code implementation to ensure that the Google ads are displayed to users in their entirety.

Thank you for your understanding. Once you've made the necessary changes, please reply to this email so that we may review your account again.

Sincerely,

XXX
The Google AdSense Team

Update : I have been getting the enquiries about the code that I used, so here is the code. Becareful, using this technique is violating the adsense policies. So don't use this anywhere.

Code:
<div>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript"></script>

<a
id="viewiframe"
onclick="DoViewIFRAME('viewiframe','hideiframe','postads1');"
style="display: none;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: sans-serif;
color: brown;">
Click to show Google Ads
</a>
<a
id="hideiframe"
onclick="DoHideIFRAME('hideiframe','postads1','viewiframe');"
style="line-height: 16px
line-height: 16px;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
font-family: sans-serif;
color: brown;">
Click to hide Google Ads
</a>
<br/><br/>
<div id="postads1">
<script type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>
</div>

Google Checkout debuted. A quick look at Checkout API

2006-06-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. revealed the launch of Google Checkout, a checkout process that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure for Google users. It offers an easy and trusted checkout option that enables shoppers to purchase from participating stores with a single Google login. Bypassing their traditional beta releases(years in beta stage) this time Google came up with fully functional and tested version because consumers would be unwilling to trust their bank accounts and credit cards to a beta version. It will serve as a centralized authorization service for customer purchases, promising the transaction security with industry-standard SSL technology. To read the remaining part of this topic, visit the original post at http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/06/google_checkout_xml_api.html

Am I an Anti-Google guy? Top Secret - Google is working on Birds eye view in their maps

2006-04-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

In last night Phienix Java Users Group(meets every month on second wednesday) meeting, Goolge made me as an Anti-Google guy. But the question is, am I an Anti-Google guy? Well, you will know after reading this. This is what happened last night. This month meeting was sponsered by Google and Google did the both key note and real world presentation.

First Part: The key note was Google Maps. Doug Ricket, Google maps developer presented this and his presentation was good, professional. During the Q&A, I asked him "Whats the advantages of Google maps API over Yahoo, MSN maps API? Because I see lot of disadvantages with the Google maps API, I am not convinced myself to use Google maps API. Could you convince me to use Google maps API by explaining the advantages?". He tried to say that "Yahoo has falsh API", but ours is "Java script API". Then I argued that "Yahoo has both Flash API and Java Script API". He agreed to that finally. Then the next questions I asked was "Google won't support the Geocoding(If it provides Geo coding you can simply input the address instead of Geo coordinates of the location, but Google wont support this and you need to reolve the address into longitude/latitude cordinates and then pass them to API), but Yahoo supports that". Then he replied "If you like Yahoo, go ahead and use it". But the question is whether I like Yahoo maps or not? The point is Yahoo has some advantages..... then I aksed "Are you accepting to waht I said?", then he replied "I am not a sales or marketing guy to comapre with others". After a minute gap again I asked him "Do you have any plans to have Birds eye image?(Go to http://local.live.com and look for Birds eye images)", then he immediately told that "Infact I am currently busy with implementing Birds eye images in Google maps and its a Top Secret". Thats good to know. But 20 minutes back to this conversation, he was talking on Satellite maps and Yahoo released the Satellite maps exactly on the same day. So he commented "We introduced Satellite maps and everyone copied". Thats true ....... Google always claims that everyone is copying them. But now he is working on Birds eye images which is originally implemented by Microsoft. Now Google is working on the same thing. Isn't it called copying?

Second Part : Googles phoenix operations Manager talked about Google, about phoenix office, avilable jobs in Phoenix, culture adn bla bla.... At the end he told that he will take any questions except from me -:) may be they thought that I am against the Google.

Third Part : Google enterprise search engineering manager talked about enterprise search and during his session he asked "How may of you used Google desktop?", about 30 to 40 people raised their hands. And then he asked "How many of you used MSN desktop?". I was the only one raised the hand in the room. He smiled at me and said "No wonder".

Fourth Part : Dinner was sponsered by Google at Aunt Chilada's with free beer and delicious Mexican food and thats the place where you can chat with fellow members and presenters etc. I talked to a couple of developers and they agreed with me on missing Geo Coding feature. So lot of people know that Google maps API is missing the core feature Geo Coding. Then I spoke to Doug Rocket and Phoenix Operations Manager(can't recall his name), explained that I am not an Anti-Google guy. If I am an Anti-Google guy, why woudl I write the artcile on Google maps and why would Goolge praises my article? Also told that I neither work for Yahoo nor Microsoft. Infact my field is Mobile devices with audio/video streaming. They wondered how could you know about different maps API if you are not working on maps. Well, thats my interest to catch up with upcoming technologies including Ajax, Web 2.0.

Thats what ahppened last night. Waht did you think so far? Am I an Anti-Google guy?or not? Now its time to concentrate on technical details:

Though Google didnot want me to talk about all disadvantages in the alst night meeting, I wanted to let our group know about the facts. Hence I wrote the all disadvanteges in a mail and sent to Gorup. The copy of the email can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phxjug/message/758.

The facts

All, In last night meeting Google made me as an anti-Google guy, but I am not. I like Google and I always use Google maps API to mash up with some other APIs. In fact I was the one who wrote the article "Building maps applications with Google Maps API" on O'reilly xml.com(http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/08/10/google-maps.html) which explains about how to use the third party Geo coding tools and where to get them. Even Google is suggesting my article( http://harikrishna.blogspot.com/2006/02/google-praised-my-article.html) for the missing Geo coding feature as they can't talk about this in their official documentation. If I am an anti-Google guy, why would I write the article on their Maps API? Why would they praise my article? My intent was not to make Google maps API is bad, but my intent was to reveal the facts about Google maps API. As a developer, here are the disadvantages/missing features(compared to other APIs) that I came across:

1. Missing Geo coding feature : Don't you think Geo coding is the fundamental piece for any map application. If one can't provide the Gecoding, what is the point of that Maps API?. Both Yahoo Maps API and MSN Maps API provides the Geo coding feature. You just pass the address, no need to resolve the address into longitude/latitude.

2.License key tied to domain/server: Its a JavaScript API, but you cannot develop the maps application simply with the browser. In order to consume Google maps API you need to have the license key. This you can get only if you provide a valid domain or at least a local server with the local host. Hence you need to have web server installed and you need to make calls to the API from the web server. Where Yahoo and Microsoft doesn't have such restrictions.

3.License key is only valid for a single directory on your website: Please refer to this FAQ http://www.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#faq9

4. They have only Java Script API. But Yahoo has Yahoo! Maps simple API, Yahoo! Maps AJAX API, Yahoo! Maps Flash API again in Flash API you can use either Action Script or Java Script or Flex API. If one wonders whats the advantage with Flash API, take a look at this http://justin.everett-church.com/ymaps/radarMaps.html which has radar theme on top of the Yahoo maps which can be draggable. And with the pirates theme http://justin.everett-church.com/ymaps/pirateMaps.html

5.They don't have local search API or driving directions API to integrate with Maps API. Yahoo! has local search API, live traffic API, travel search API, trip search API(they just launched yesterday along with satellite maps). Google always claims that they introduced and others copied. OK. What about the Birds eye view in MSN maps( go to http://local.live.com and look for Birds eye view)? MSN introduced and Google is working on that. Isn't it called copying -:)

6.Microsoft has Birdseye Image API to integrate with maps.

7.Microsoft allows you to right click on the map anywhere and you can mark that(they call it Pushpin, ckeck it out at http://local.live.com ). Also it provides to/from directions from that mark. Its a very helpful feature if you know the area on the map and if you don't know the exact address of that area.

8.Google maps cannot remember the locations as they don't have the integration into the portal. Some of the Google services requires to have GMail account, but some services will allows you to have with different email address. For example Google Groups. Yahoo and MSN has nice portal integration with single sign-on and allows you to save the locations.

9.Yahoo automatically defaults to the your location based on IP address. MSN does the same thing plus they have locate me plug in which identifies your location based on Wi-Fi signal. But Goolge maps doesn't.

This is what I noticed in Google maps and again, I am not forcing anyone to switch from Google maps. Its your decision and you choose the maps which you like.
Regs
Hari Gottipati

Our Group response
Which can also be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phxjug/message/759
Hari,

Thank you for the excellent points and for providing further insight into this topic.
I could be wrong, but I believe the only thing the Google folks (Doug in particular) were trying to do was to be professional and focus on the merits of their product. The merits or deficiencies of the Microsoft and Yahoo products is better left to Microsoft and Yahoo, or better yet to an independent "expert" such as yourself in a separate session.
- Richard

Conclusion
I guess you know the facts by now. I am not an Anti-Google guy. I like Google.

Google comments on my article "Hacking maps with Google maps API"

2006-02-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on Google site lately and noticed that Google praised my article "Hacking maps with Google maps API" by saying its pretty good article and provides solid information. This is the only article that they mentioned on their http://code.google.com site. Wow! this is amazing!!! As they keep updating this site, after some time this will go away(they will have only four latest updates). So I stored this as a snapshot, double click on it to see the Google testimonial.

Yahoo Q search

2006-02-13T20:33:00.000-08:00

Yhaoo Q search is an entirely new way to search - using context to add relevance and users can search "at the point of inspiration," from the page they are reading.

Just click on the below link "Hari Gottipati" to see the yahoo search results inline:

Hari Gottipati

Chat feature in Gmail - Merging GTalk with GMail.

2006-02-06T22:02:00.000-08:00

Just now I saw Chats under messages in my Gmail account. I was surprised to see chats in Gmail. Clicked on it and noticed that your GTalk chat sessions gets stored into GMail account and can be searched jsut like email messages. Also noticed that they are working on Chat feature in Gmail which enables the browser itslef as chat client by logging into Gmail account. So which elminates installing GTalk client. From the browser you can see your friends when they are online, you can set your status and even you can make free voice calls. Checkout the screen shot of chatting feature in Gmail and more information about this fearure at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/chat.html. Notice the logo in the screen shot, talk beneath Gmail. So they are combining GTalk and Gmail. So whats next..... soon will see MSN messenger merging into Hotmail and Yahoo messenger merging into Yahoo mail. Insider info says that MSN and Yahoo engineers got a call from their bosses to work tonight as they got the new work that they need to deliver as early as they can. Poor engineers at MSN and Yahoo, they must be hating Google for their sleepless nights.

IBM is shutting down their public UDDI Business Registry

2005-12-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today IBM sent the UDDI Business Registry shutdown notice to all registered users saying that the service will no longer available after January 12th, 2006. From he notice "In February 2005, the Version 3 of the Universal Description, Discoveryand Integration (UDDI) V3 was approved as an OASIS standard. Havingachieved that milestone, the companies hosting the UDDI BusinessRegistry (UBR) evaluated the results of hosting a referenceimplementation for the UDDI technology. Over the past five years, asWeb services applications have matured, the role of UDDI basedregistries has also evolved in part based on testing experiences withUBR. Registries based on UDDI have been established within enterprisesand organizations and have an important role in Web services businessapplications. The availability of UBR provided valuable validation andguidance during the early days of UDDI. Now that the benefits of thistechnology have been realized and many organizations have establishedtheir own UDDI registries, the IBM-hosted UBR will be discontinued". For more information, visit shutdown faq page.

First impression on new live mail(new hotmail) - auto spell check feature, drag and drop, not as neat as new Yahoo mail interface...same annoying ads

2005-12-14T18:55:00.000-08:00

Again I got new hotmail(dubbed as live mail) invitation before all of my friends. How lucky I am..... Its based on Ajax... so drag and dropping.... nice auto spell checker(like its in MS word...see below screen shot). To address automatically suggests the emails from contacts... 2GB storage size(competiting with Gmail)... right click menu like yahoo(This is what lacking in Gmail). But whats not good is when u create a new folder its asking javascript input box to name the folder... which is very bad.... Look at yahoo how they are doing...in new yahoo email interface if you create the new folder its just acting like how u create the new folder in regualr windows explorer. This is very bad in windows live mail. Like yahoo this interface is also has lots of visual ads which are distrubing lot. No tabbed pane, yahoo new mail interface looks better because of the tabbed pane. Though I personally use hotmail, overall yahoo mail interface looks neater than windows live mail. Here are some screen shots: Inbox(like outlook): compose(auto spell checker like MS word spell checker): Creating new folder(very bad its popping Javascript input to enter the folder name):

Google added RSS feeds to Gmail - they call it Web Clips

2005-12-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Google just added Web Clips feature to Gmail. I was using Gmail late night and in the middle noticed this new feature. From Gmail help center, "Web Clips shows you news headlines, Gmail tips, blogs, any RSS and Atom feed, relevant sponsored links, and more -- right at the top of your inbox and messages. Receive updates from your favorite sites without having to leave Gmail!". Right above to inbox you can see the feed one at a time and can scroll through clips you’ve already seen by clicking previous/next links. At moment when I try to add slashdot feed, I am getting Jacascript alert "The system was unable to perform your peration. Please try again after sometime". Since they enbeld this feature jsut now, they must be having some problems!!!

First impression on new Yahoo mail.... Impressive as a web based mail, more of outlook, ajax based drag and drop features, annoying ads

2005-12-08T22:23:00.000-08:00

If you remember I was one of them who got the gmail invitation earlier. Again, now I got the opportunity to test new Yahoo mail interface. Did anyone get the invitation? It must be on way to you. How it looks? As a web based mail its very impressive..... its exactly like out look interface. Drag and drop the mails from one folder to another folder, search meail, tabbed pane to open multiple mails from main window, better compose interface, clicking on "To" will populate contacts like out look, out look styled spell checker. Overall its impressive... no calendar implementation in Ajax, similarly note pad. Options will be taking to regular yahoo mail. More features yet to come. Nice handling of right click menu like in outlook. Whats bad, the visual ads.... right hand side from top to bottome.... boy, those ads are annoying..... thats where Google is leading by putting simple text ads. Here are the screen shots(Double click on the image to see it clear): Inbox with right click menu Compose with spell checker Contacts, watch the tabbed pane and search option

Microsofts first attack on Google...... AOL is ditching Google and joining Microsoft for search, online ads.....

2005-12-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Though CNN says that a newspaper confirms that AOL is joining hands with Microsoft, Guradian, UK based paper confirms that the news paper is New York Times. From Guradian, "according to unnamed sources quoted by the New York Times, Microsoft has emerged as the front-runner to land the stake, which Time Warner is auctioning in a bid to boost its share of the online advertising market". Earlier, Yahoo! Chief Executive Terry Semel and CFO Susan Decker had "politely passed" on the deal's proposed terms in a meeting with Time Warner executives in New York. Talks with Microsoft started earlier as switching to MSN search was on the agenda started beginning of this year. So far we have seen Google attacking Microsoft, but this is the first time that Microsoft attacking in reverse. As per Scott Kessler, an analyst at Standard & Poor says "Suddenly the competitive landscape looks a lot less favorable to Google for next year at this time compared to last year at this time. It would be a mounting threat to Yahoo!". As I always wrote that Google is going to have downtime soon, this could be one of the sign of it!!! Lets watch how it goes!

New Web Services Specifications emerged for Transactions across heterogeneous environments

2005-11-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Before jumping into the specifications, lets go thruough this example: Think of a hypothetical web service that provides banking services. The service provides 2 operations: a credit operation and a debit operation. Now if the two operations are to be used to perform a monetary transfer between two accounts, it must be ensured that either both operations succeed or neither does.

public class ... implements SessionBean {
   public ... foo(....) {
      Bank bank= new BankServiceLocator().getBank();
      bank.credit(1001, 10);
      bank.debit(1002, 10);
   }
}

What if something goes wrong(system unavailable or hard disk crash etc) after the first transaction. Here there is no way to enusre that both operations will succeed. Lets revisit the example with Web Services Transaction approach inplace:

public class ... implements SessionBean {
   private SessionContext ctx;
   public void setSessionContext(SessionContext ctx) {
       this.ctx= ctx; 
   }
   public ... foo(....) {
       Bank bank= new BankServiceLocator().getBank();
       UserTransaction ut= ctx.getUserTransaction();
       ut.begin();
       try {
            bank.credit(1001, 10);
            bank.debit(1002, 10);
       }catch (Exception e) {
            ut.rollback();
       }
       ut.commit();
   }
}

In the above example, you are not commiting the transaction unless both succeeds. This is similar to our traditional transaction approach, but in Web Services it has to happen between two different platforms. Thats where this Transaction Specifications comes into the picture. The above example is based on Kandula which provides an open-source implementation of trio of Web Services Transaction standards(WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity) based on Axis and Integrate existing open source JTA implementations (e.g. JOTM, JBoss, Geronimo, etc.) with the web services transaction management framework so that J2EE web services and clients may take part in atomic transactions while using JTA for transaction management. The initial implementation will be in Java using Axis/Java. Back to the Transaction standards: Under the Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) Technical Committee, OASIS(Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems) announced a trio of new services for Web Services coordination to ease the process of transactions across heterogeneous environments and coordinate the outcomes of distributed application actions. The Web Services Transactions specifications describe an extensible coordination framework (WS-Coordination) and specific coordination types for: Short duration, two phase commit(WS-AtomicTransaction) Longer running business transactions, asynchronus (WS-BusinessActivity). WS-Coordination This is the protocol for establishing a connection between two systems.The framework defined in this specification enables an application service to create a context needed to propagate an activity to other services and to register for coordination protocols. The framework enables existing transaction processing, workflow, and other systems for coordination to hide their proprietary protocols and to operate in a heterogeneous environment. The procedure to establish coordination between the set of participants of an activity has two stages. In the first stage, the activity is configured; one may think of this as the participants being wired together. The second stage is that in which the participants exchange messages over the wires according to the protocols that have been established. The protocols in this section represent those needed to do the initial wiring—a small set of primitive operations to establish a specific coordination protocol among participants. In particular, the WS-Coordination specification defines the following: - A format for a CoordinationContext, which contains the information needed to request to participate in an activity. - A protocol to create a CoordinationContext for an activity. - How to pass a CoordinationContext in application messages as a way for one service to invite another service to participate in the activity. - A protocol to register to participate in the activity. The transaction is then handled by one of the other two standards, depending on their duration. WS-AtomicTransaction WS-AtomicTransaction specifies concrete protocols for distributed atomic transactions using the two-phase commit abstract protocol. The completion protocol handles successful multistep transactions and rolls back in case of transaction failure. WS-AtomicTransaction is designed for short-term transactions with minimal data. The atomic transaction 2PC protocol coordinates registered services to reach a commit or abort decision, and informs all services of the final result. The decision is the same for all the services in the transaction. Making this group decision uses two phases: - Prepare phase: All participants are asked to get ready to either commit or abort, and then vote on the overall outcome. The vote is propagated up to the root coordinator to make the overall group decision. - Commit phase: If all participants vote to commit, the decision will be to commit. Otherwise, it will be to abort. Although a coordination protocol defines a two-party interaction, the above 2PC protocol is an example of how it can also constrain the interaction between multiple services. WS-BusinessActivity A business activity service is expected to use multiple atomic transactions to move the application from one consistent state to another. This leverages atomic transactions to handle system-generated exceptions, so that business activity coordination need handle only application-generated exceptions. The WS-BusinessActivity coordination protocols provide a standard way for application code to drive toward an overall agreement while preserving their autonomy, even when application-generated exceptions occur. This agreement can involve a single pair of services or multiple pairs of services. Each business activity should handle a single coordination agreement. When an application involves multiple different agreements, then multiple business activities should be used. This specification provides the definition of the business activity coordination type that is to be used with the extensible coordination framework described in the WS-Coordination specification. The specification defines two specific agreement coordination protocols for the business activity coordination type: - BusinessAgreementWithParticipantCompletion: The participant knows when the coordinator will ask no more work of it. - BusinessAgreementWithCoordinatorCompletion: The coordinator has to tell the participant that no more work will be asked of it. Advantages with transaction services: - It eliminates the need for middleware to be the mediator in doing transactions between systems, thus results in out-of-the-box interoperability. - Earlier we couldn’t have transactions that went from one platform to another. Typically, transactional systems are tightly coupled and have to take place on the same platform. Some could be done with a great deal of coding, hard coded and very inflexible. This defines a spec to navigate the two platforms. - WS-Coordination provides uniformity for the creation, propagation, and joining of a distributed activity. WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity extend this with agreement coordination protocols. Together they provide coordination mechanisms to handle exceptions from a wide variety of sources, ranging from hardware to software to the real world.

Google in Phoenix - why it is landing in the valley and how to get into it ?

2005-10-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

After a while of rumors, Google, the Silicon Valley Internet search engine giant officially announced it will open an engineering facility in the Phoenix valley with an expected 600 jobs. This is another good news after Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp. decided to build a new $3 billion chip-making factory in Chandler (suburban Phoenix), providing a projected 1,000 jobs once complete. Great! Finally valley is becoming high tech!! Good news for valley IT professionals and also good news for real estate(at least as per realtors) if you are caught in the housing boom(or bubble??) fever. Though Google said it will transfer a small number of people from its headquarters but will mostly hire locally to fill the estimated 600 jobs at the new facility. A temporary office is already open in downtown Phoenix but Google plans to establish a permanent facility at a location yet to be chosen in the metropolitan area and expected to be fully operational by end of 2006. Good! But why it is coming to valley? Good question! Google will always maintains the secrecy about what they are doing and they dont let the engineers leaking the news. Google is very strict about this and last friday they updated their privacy policy by mentioning "employees who violate the policy will be fired and prosecuted". The reason as per Google's announcement was "area's pool of qualified potential employees, Arizona's education system and the quality of life in the Phoenix area." Was it true? Na, I don't think so. Don't think that I am opposing Google words about qualified professionals and Arizona education system. I definitely agree to the words, but I don't agree that it was the reason. Here are my guesses why Google wants to land in the valley Reason 1 : Google may be planning data center in Phoenix. As valley is free from natural disasters, this place will be ideal for data centers. Also Phoenix has lot of data centers/servers and potentially Google can take over some data centers like easynews(www.easynews.com- Easynews is one of the big supporters of the Open Source movement and donate servers, disk space and bandwidth to the SourceForge project). Reason 2 : Google is planning to move the rumored online payment service development/business to Phoenix. Phoenix is known as a back-office to support payment services as Bank of America,Wells Fargo and American Express have operations located in Phoenix. In June, bloggers began circulating that Google was readying a payment wallet that would compete with PayPal(acquired by Ebay) service. Its all started when ChannelAdvisor's CEO Scot Wingo made reference to a Google Wallet payment service at a Piper Jaffray Internet conference. Wingo was participating on a panel discussion called, "e-CommerceIs There a Version 3.0?" with Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com and a representative from Shopping.com (set to be acquired by eBay later this year) when he referenced about this. As usual, Google has not responded to the reports and declined to comment. Reason 3 : Google wants to have huge office for its mega auction center and Phoenix could potentially save the cost. There are rumors speculating that Google is planning for auctions in a big way by directly competiting ebay, MSN and Yahoo. If it is true, it will affect the eBay AdWords bidding strategies. Reason 4 : As Yahoo concentrated on small business by offering domain registration and web hosting, may be Google wants to jump to the same wagon and Phoenix is good place for this kind of business as I mentioned in Reason 1. Also there were rumors around that Google will acquire the No.1 domain registration company GoDaddy which is Scottsdale(Another valley location) based company. If this is true, most likely Google will end up opening the office in Scottsdale. GoDaddy recently surpass the register.com, most say because of their controversial super-bowl commercial(Click here to watch the controversial commercial. On this page, click on Prior commercials and select Super Bowl Full "Web Only" Censorship Hearing). Good place to work Whatever the reason it is, its good for valley people. By this time, lot of people might be working on their resumes to pursue an opportunity to work with worlds search leader. Apart from the challenging work, one can enjoy the Google environment which includes free onsite cooked lunch with professional chefs, onsite doctor/ dentist, onsite laundry facilities, onsite baby care center etc etc. Most amazingly, working 4 days for them and one day(its 20% of your time) on your own project by utilizing the inside Googles technology and data, and have the opportunity to sell your project to them like Google news, Google suggest. Recruiting Process Well, its every ones dream to work with Google, but is it easy? Hmm, little tough though. On average Google will receive 1500 resumes each day. Google introduced lot of techniques to filter the resumes that they receive. One such example is that Google had a big hoarding on SFO's freeway 101 which simply says "first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits e}.com" without anything mentioning about Google. If you are a Geek and finds out the answer as 7427466391.com and visit that site you will see another equation to solve, with still no sign the game was hosted by Google. Finally after solving the equation one will end up landing on Google site with the opportunity of submitting the resume. One can think about the Google's recruiting process based on this resume submission process. On top of this Google prefers PhDs. Currently Google has more percentage(against total number of employees) of PhDs than Microsoft. Resume is important for Google job hunters As Google filters the hundreds of resumes per day, you need to impress them with the resume. Getting the call for an interview is very important thing. Check the follwoing sample resumes and work on your resume. Exceptional B.Tech Masters with 3 Yrs expereince PhD with relevant experience And then practice the mathematical puzzles as their interview process will be mainly trageted on solving these puzzles. For an example check this. Good luck and happy job hunting!!!

Yahoo is testing next generation web mail interface...MSN too...MSN joining hands with AOL... Googel talk not surprised many.....Is Google party over?

2005-09-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Yes, there are many indications that the downtime of Google is about to start. This week has seen many exciting announcements and rumors which includes, Yahoo and MSN is testing the next generation web mail interface, Microsoft in talks with AOL. Looks Googles competetitos got energized and re-engineering/designing their products to heat up the portal race. Lets go thruough the details.
Current email market According to the most recent figures during July from comScore Media Metrix, a research firm: Yahoo - 63.6 million unique US visitors AOL - 48.7 million visitors MSN's Hotmail - 44.4 million Comcast's Webmail - 5.6 million Google's Gmail - 5.4 million
Yahoo's next genration rich web mail interface When Google intorudced Gmail with 1GB storage, Yahoo increased their storage limit to 250 MB from 2MB and then to 1GB from 250 MB. On the other hand, Google increased the storage limit to 2GB and then to 2.5 GB. Instead of competiting in the storage limit now Yahoo focused on the interface. Yahoo, the No.1 mail is redesigned their interface more like that of a desktop e-mail application and faster response time. It looks like the Microsofts famous email cient outlook and has the similar features including e-mail caching; message preview; drag-and-drop filing; the capability of quickly searching e-mail headers, body text and attachments; and the ability to view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time. In addition, the new version will add address auto-complete, right-click menus and standard keyboard shortcuts. No doubt its a rich web client, think of having all features on web that desktop client is doing. See the screen shots of new Yahoo email interface and it is in beta and limited to the group of Yahoo email users in United States.
MSN too... Under the code name Kahuna and the final name is "Mail"(no more hotmail??????), MSN is also working on the new mail interface. The team has posted the first image of Mail Beta. The new interface is inspired from Outlook, but whereas Yahoo has placed the previewing pane under the messages’ titles, Mail Beta has chosen three columns. On the left one you have you have the Inbox, the middle one contains the messages and the right-side columns is for previewing. Similarly to Yahoo, keyboard shortcuts have been introduced, which can be used to open messages, to delete or to toggle through e-mails and folders. The Mail Beta service is being tested, but it’s only available to small number of users.
Microsoft AOL wedding..... There has been lot of rumors floating around about the Microsfts could be opting for a stake in the AOL division. This deal might cause the loss to Google as currently 11% of Google's ad revenue is through AOL. As AOL and MSN will have a combined audience of 167.8 million, including overlaps compared to Yahoo's 101.3 million unique visitors and Google's 80.4 million in August. In search business, Google controlled 56 per cent of global search queries, Yahoo! Inc. had 22 per cent and Microsoft had 11 per cent according to figures for June.
Google talk, won't set the world on fire Recently Google released their IM named Google Talk is not surprised the audience like their other products Gmail, Goolge Maps. People say its simple and neat, but not many features compared to the existing IM programs. But its ad-free unlike Gmail. Some people got surprised with Google talk, because people expected lot as its coming from Google. Many are not excited by Google talk and did not switch to it.
Is Goolge loosing their focus from search? Recently, Google has seemed intent on capturing every area of consumer technology that isn't nailed down. Remember when Yahoo was just a search engine? In its day, Yahoo was the Web's best search tool, but after adding Web mail, instant messaging, news, maps, desktop search capabilities and goodness knows what else, Yahoo lost sight of its search technology. And that left an opening for Google to fill. But now we're wondering if Google is making the same mistake. Since gaining dominance as a top search engine, Google has been adding all sorts of ancillary features, including e-mail, IM and, last month, Google Talk, an XMPP-compatible public IM server. There's a real danger that Google is losing its edge in search technology. Check this InformationWeek Opinion: Nowadays, when you use it to do a comparative search on consumer and small-business offerings, Google hacks and totally unrelated sites keep popping up to the top--and the problem is getting worse. They also blamed that instead of fixing this, Google is creating e-mail and IM services. What do you think now? Do you agree with me? As I said in my earlier blog "sooner or later we will experience the downside of Google as Google cannot maintain the same mommentum in this competetive portal war".

Yahoo 360 - Not just blogging tool, lot more than that

2005-09-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

It took so long for Yahoo to introduce the blogs. Even after their intial anouncement about the Yahoo 360, it took long time for them to release the 360. Coming to the 360, its not just blogging tool. Its lot more than that. You can have rss feeds and can share them with others, message center(people can leave messages), create alerts to notify about the new messages, invitations, testimonals, comments and also this allows social networking. Take a look at my 360 page and feel what it is. If you ask the question, will u become a switcher(From blogger to 360)? Na, I still like blogger interface. Here are the features of Yahoo 360: - On top, Post a Blast as a yell, question, sale or quotation. You can make attention of the visitors with this. - On left, Post a picture of yourself, visitors can leave the message and can see whether you are online or offline. - In the middle, can manage your blog, can manage RSS feeds(notice this blogger feed on Yahoo 360), can share reviews, can create lists(If anyone has the same list others will be linked to this list. I created Indian Music and whoever has this list can be seen by clicking on this automatically. Yahoo 360 combines the users of the same interests together). - On right, can share photos,can stream pcitures from Flcikr, can list the friends and can share the Yahoo groups. And remember, you can control exactly what is seen by whom. What else do you need? I need customizable look and feel. Can it? Nope, Currently Yahoo 360 doesn't allow to have customized look and feel.

Googgle IM unveiled

2005-08-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

As I worte in my previosu blog, much rumored IM is finally out from the Goolge with name Google talk. It enables users to quickly and easily talk or send instant messages to their friends for free. Calls are made through your computer using the latest voice technology; all you need is an Internet connection, a microphone and a speaker. I installed Google talk as soon as its debuted and it has very simple interface. As usually they made some thing different in look and feel than regular IMs. You can invite the friends to join Google talk directly from IM and you can see them as invited under contacts. Its tied to Gmail, that means user needs to have Gmail account in order to use Google talk. Unlike other IMs, Google talk is open and you can write you own client that can talk to Google talk. Already there are other clients which can be connected to Google talk. At moment Google decided to keep the IM simpler and cleaner without any text ads. Lets see how it competes with other gaints MSN, Yahoo and AOL in IM market!!!!

Google is ready for Instant Messaging!!!!!!!!

2005-08-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

According to Internetnews.com Google should announce this week the acquisition of Meetroduction, makers of location-aware social networking software Meetro. Meetro combines IM with local buddy finding. You can look for people who have similar interests and are located within a certain distance. Unlike traditional IMs, its instant, no need to add contacts to start conversations. "Just run Meetro, double-click on a person and begin chatting immediately. It's all real-time, which means you see and communicate with local people who are online right now." It works with multiple versions including Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and the company planned to eventually support MSN Messenger and Jabber as well.

Article : Building map applications with Ajax and Google maps API

2005-07-27T18:39:00.000-07:00

The complete article is coming soon at O'REILLY xml.com. In the mean time experience Ajax demo-Yahoo search as you type and the Google maps application Hacked version, Official version. Here are the excerpts from the upcoming article: User friendly maps with Ajax and shadowed info windows with XML & XSL Though Google divulged their maps API lately, many of the developers including me experimented (tinkered) their API earlier. I built the Irving City parks demo (the same example that I am going to discuss in this article) with the tinkered API. Google maps, an innovative UI approach which diversified the end user experience utterly. I heard my fellow developers talking much about this, when Google unveiled maps. One of the developer commented that "if you experience Google maps then you realize that the existing maps is not even doing 10% of what Google is doing". I do not agree to the numbers, but I indubitably agree that they reinvented the UI presentation. Soon after Google rolled out Gmail and maps, lot of people/developers started thinking/writing/migrating their web applications with this contemporary presentation. The drag feature is engrossing the throng in Google maps. An end user feels snug in dragging the map to see top/bottom/left/right of the map rather than clicking top/bottom/left/right links. Similarly, the zoom feature. Though it gets the new map from server each time, end user thinks it's happening as they drag (at least on broadband connection). Thanks to AJAX methodology which makes this happen asynchronously with the help of XMLHttpRequest. Ajax:The Buzz Ajax is not new , but Google has brought Ajax techniques to the mass-market in a way that it makes end users life so easy. Its the biggest buzz in today's web development and the credit goes to the Google. Until Google exercised(not invented) it, other public web sites have not gazed into this. Google exerted this technique to implement Google maps, which got much attention than any other maps. Its the same maps, same directions. But Google maps got the momentum because the way they are presenting to the user in a more convenient manner. Zoom in, zoom out and move everything by mouse without refreshing the page in the browser. Check more about Ajax in my previous blog and for the complete article, stay tuned. XML.com is publishing the article in a week or two. Related : Will Google disppaear in 5 years? Check the possibilities.

Google invented, Microsoft copied, Microsoft virtual earth debuted. Hybrid maps appearing on Google maps, lifted from MSN? Will Yahoo join the race?

2005-07-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

MSN Virtual Earth has gone live. Its been heavily influenced by Google Maps in the combination of local search and mapping. Virtual Earth has the now-familiar draggable aerial web map, such as the ability to zoom in using your mouse scroll wheel. If you look at the below features, everything is lifted from Google maps. Draggable feature Resizing the map window to fill up the browser window Color scheme Toggle between street maps and aerial photos DHTML layering to show point data on top of the maps Searching, navigating, and finding points-of-interest Java script based API Pushpin(Marker in Google maps) The only thing that I noticed which might be MSN's own idea is "Hybrid" maps, which is combination of maps and aerial view. But today I noticed the same thing on Google maps. Possible that Google might have copied from MSN. Like Google maps, MSN virtual earth works with IE and Firefox. "Locate me" is very good and I liked it lot. You can install Location Finder to display your current location on a Virtual Earth map by using Wi-Fi technology. If you do not install Location Finder, or if your computer does not support Wi-Fi, Virtual Earth can attempt to find your location by using the Internet Protocol (IP) address of your computer. This method is less accurate. My feeling that its a Microsofts answer to Google maps. Yahoo, are you listening? If yes, where is your answer? Based on past things, sooner or later Yahoo will definetely join the race. If you want to develop applications here is the API site.

Google maps API, officially out

2005-06-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

Today Google announced maps API officially, but unofficially lot of developers including me already built applications based on the API. Even I played little bit with their unofficail API in last month and created small example with Irving, TX parks on Google maps. Check this out at http://www.myjavaserver.com/~harikrishna/new/map.html. Google maps API is very simple to use. All you need to know the longitude and latitude of the location you want to display. It marks the locations with a little icon. You can add your own content on the little pop-up which popsup when you click on the icon. This popup will be controlled by XML data with XSL presentation. So in order to use Google maps, one needs to know Java Script, XML, XSL. There is no indication of Directions and search by address in the API at this moment(atelast I dont aware of it).

Ajax : Hottest methodology that changing the Web applications

2005-06-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

Ajax(Asynchronus Javascript, XML) the biggest buzzword in web development, is completely changing the web applications to a different direction. Google, which utilized this technique to implement Google maps, which got much attention. I heard people saying "If you compare the existing maps(yahoo, mapquest etc) with Google maps, they are not doing evern 10% of the job what Google maps is doing". Its the same maps, same directions. But why Google maps got the momentum? Its the way the implemented, draggable features. Zoom in, zoom out everything by mouse and can move the maps all with just mouse without browser to display a new web page. So the question are: How Google maps is showing new map without displaying the new page? Is it loading all possible data to browser and showing? How much data it can dump to browser? Is it contacting web server and getting new maps each time you drag? If so why your browser is not getting reloaded? The answer is XMLHttpRequest. Its a set of APIs that cane be used by JavaScript, VBScript and other web scripting languages to transfer XML or other data from a web server to the browser over HTTP protocol. The mail advantage of this is the ability to dynamically update the webpage without reloading the webpage. It is used by mayn websites(Google suggest, Google maps, Google mail, Pinpointtravel.com, Sidestep.com) to implement responsive and dynamic web applications. This was invented by Microsoft originally and implemented as a ActiveX object, hence possible to access via any scripting lanugage supported by the browser. This is available in Internet Explorer since version 5.0. Mozilla implemented the same object in native and available since version 1.0. This was later implemented in Safari 1.2 and Opera 8.0. Similar functionality is covered DOM(Document object model) Level 3 Load and Sane Specification, which is W3C recommendation. As of now, no web browser supports this spec. So XMLHttpRequest still remains as de facto standard and it was Jesse James Garrett who named this technique as Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Stay tuned, I will show how to use the XMLHttpObject with the examples. Mean time, experience the demo I created. This demo is done wth Ajax, Java Script XML paerser and Yahoo Web Services.

Take your VoIP phone along, no need to stick to one computer

2005-05-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

The traditional VoIP systems install on a home computer and it requires a special modem. These are not portable and its difficult to access your phone account on a public terminal. But i2 Telecom an Atlanta based phone company changed this with the product called Voice stick. Voice Stick is a software based VoIP phone that is loaded on a flash based USB device. Its a tiny and as thin as five pack of Juicy Fruit gum. Simply plug Voice Stick into the USB port of any PC, then it will be automatically recognised and phone keypad will be poped up on the screen to use it. Portability is no problem with this device and you can simply carry this in your packet.

Google launched personalized Google, Can't it be My Google?

2005-05-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

Today Google unveiled its personalized google(calling it as My Google is simply copying Yahoo and MSN?), which is like My Yahoo and My MSN. It has drag and drop feature like My MSN where you can move your categories easily. At moment it has only Gmail, Driving Directions, Stock symbols, Weather, Movie listings, Google news, news from BBC, NYTimes and slash dot. Of course these are few categories compare to Yahoo and MSN, but its just evolving.... See my personalized google page below.

Google Might Disappear in Five Years-Steve Balmer, lets check the possibilities

2005-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer : Check it out at upper right corner.
According to Steve Ballmer, Mircosofts CEO, the online search engines represent the key points of the future technology, and the leader Google will perish in less than five years. A week back Bill Gates opinioned that Cell Phone(Windows Mobile powered) will beat iPod. Definetely Google will not die in 5 years, but can Google continue the same growth? Its doubtful. Google, their main commodity is just indexing(I don't think their other technologies blogger, orkut, picasa etc are upto the mark!) which making their search engine better. Can it maintain the same momentum with just one technology? Google will have a hard time sustaining any profitability in the long term with just search techonology. Look at the DoComo in Japan, its the biggest tsunami in telecom market. Created waves more than Google now its making. What happened? Last year DoComo didn't meet the expectations. Same thing will happen with Google, not now but sooner. On the other hand Microsoft and Yahoo are not just based on search technology, search is just part of their techinologies. Thats why Google started lot of extra services apart from core search including mail, videos, blogging, photo tool, satellite image maps etc. So it knows that it cannot survive just based on search technology. With the current market value, its got enough money, which can drive the company to have other technologies. Lets see other aspect of the company! Is it competing the Microsoft? Why Google calls their corporate policys is "no evil" policy(Referring Microsoft policy as evil policy)? Why most of the Google job ads are just like Micrsoft job ads? Why there is a Google office five miles down the road from Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters? Why it trapped 100 Microsofts employees? By looking at all these what do you think? I dont have any idea how it is going to compete Microsoft? Microsoft is a big company. They are not just dependant on one technology. They have OS, database, office tools, mobile tools, server tools etc. How Google is going to do to compete Microsoft? A Google office which competes Microsofts office, but runs in browser instead of a application? I am OK to have my personal email and my personal photos being there on Google servers, but definetely not my office documents. I think its not a good idea for Google to go in that direction. There is already criticism with Googles cookie that keeps track of you. No wonder oneday if you query "My Google" for your agenda, anything you did in the past. Also there is a criticism about Google automated sponsered results, which lets terrorist groups listing their sites. Lets see how these privacy concerns drives the Google! Based on all this, I can say that there will be downside for the Google. But the question is when it will be?(Its stock price is still roaring. As of today its above $250, yet to see downside) Back to Steve Balmer statement, how come Google will die in 5 years? Based on what he is predicting? Its "impossible". Everybody knows that Google is not just start up company. Insiders at Microsoft shocked when Google released its desktop version before Microsoft releases. Microsoft spent lot of moeny and lot of people involved in developing the desktop search, but Google released its desktop search 2 months earlier than Microsoft. So one cannot simply ignore Google and its capabilities. Possible that it can't maintain the same momentum for 5 more years. Microsoft always thinks that any other company or any other product which competes with Microsofts products cannot survive. Similarly with the iPod. Since it became so popular, they say it it will be replaced by cell phone. It might happens. Future cellphoes might come with better techinolgies which might be better than iPods. Sooner or later, some other technology will always replace the current technolgy. That everybody knows. But why they target particluar product or company? Cant they make generalised statement like "CellPhones will replace MP3 palyers" instead of "CellPhones will replace iPods"? Anyway, lets wait and see how Google maintains the same buzz in coming days!!!!!.

Toyota Prius stalls due to a software glitch, needs a software patch(Hope its not powered by Windows OS!)

2005-05-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

From windows PCs to cars, software glitch now stalling the vehicles. National Highway Traffic Safety administration lodged 13 complaints so far on Prius engine due to a software glitch which stalls or shuts down the vehicle at highway speeds. They mentioned no injuries, but the report didn't mention any accidents. Nearly 24 thousand cars affected by this software glitch. Toyota last year sent a service notice tp Prius owners advising them to bring the cars into dealers for an hour-long software upgrade. Oh boy! we are entering into a world where cars needs a software update. Whats next? An automatic update to cars computer system through wireless? through Bluetooth? Stop by Wi-Fi hub and run update? Let's see.....

AOL offers free web mail with 2GB storage and blogging tools. Is it joining the portal war with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft?

2005-05-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

AOL, an internet service provide leader is entering into portal business. Today AOL announced free e-mail to any internet user(until now its available to only AOL customers) with a storage of 2GB. Its neither hitting Microsoft's Hotmail(250 MB), nor Yahoo mail(1GB). Instead it is directly hitting Google's Gmail(2GB). Now the question is, why would one consider the AOL free e-mail? Whats the greatness in it? Besides storage, search and security features, AIM Mail ties into the AIM service. It has an address book with an AIM presence indicator. Recently I sent an instant message to one of my friend, and I knew that he was away from the IM and he didn't read that. And then I realised that I sent the wrong message. Since he didn't read that and its not correct, then I thogut that I could have had the ability to delete it. Isn't a good feature for IM. There you go, AOL is offering that feature. An "unsend" feature lets users cancel a message after it's been sent to another AOL or AIM Mail user -- if the message is unread. Users can also check to see if a message sent to an AOL or AIM user has been read. Not just mail, AOL also entered into blogging market with AOL Journals to compete Google's blogger, Microsoft's MSN Spaces and Yahoo's 360(yet to be released). AOL Journal features include: multiple blog templates; the ability to update journals via IM; spam filters; photo upload tools; and support for Really Simple Syndication 2.0, number of hits the users' blog receives and lets visitors with an AIM or AOL screen name to post feedback. Whoever wins the war, the end user is getting benifited. Imagine a 2GB free mail storage, free blogging, free photo sharing tools etc. Lets wait and see who wins the race!

IT development(Outsourcing) on a Cruise ship, no H1 restrictions for IT people, you can come as "seamen" and work on IT projects, legally

2005-05-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Isn't it a cool idea!!!! Starting a development company on a cruise ship three miles off the coast... Stay there, develop there and ocassionally you can visit US land on shore passes. In order to get there, you dont need a H1 visa, so there is no worry about the H1 quota as long as you working on sea. You can come and work under "seamen" quota. Though you are working on a software development project(which requires H1 visa), before that you are working on water. So its legal. A legal way of working on software projects in US having H1 visa. Another interesting thing is you will have quarters(personal room), food and once in a while ship would sail to Baja Mexico for vacation. Don't you think its interesting, being in you quarters you can visit a Island on a vacation. Another advantage is on the way to Baja Mexico, one can code until he reaches the Island. Time saving.... if you work on land and want to go for vacation, right from leaving the home to Island you will be idle and can't do anything. Or you can fish in the leasure time. That way you can learn fishing, which might help you to develop the fishing skills apart from the technical skill. Never know that it might help you in the future. Like the famous quotation "Don't give a man fish to feed his family, instead give him a fishing rod and teach him to fish for himself". Off the topic for little humor, here is the spoof to that quotation... "Give a man a beer and he'll waste an hour, teach a man to brew and he'll waste a lifetime." "Give a man a fish and he'll feed his family for a day, Teach a man to catch his own fish and he'll sit in a boat all day drinking beer." Anyway, back to development on Cruise Ship, the ship can sail to India to recruit SAP experts, can sail to China to recruit Network engineers and can sail to Russia for embedded developers. The main focus of this development center is outsourcing, a new business model for outsourcing(its bettet if we refer it as cruisesourcing or watersourcing). If it clicks, it will have the impact on Indian outsourcing revenue. Another advantage is staying closer to the client. For example if the client is Sun Micro Systems, the ship can sail to San francisco. If the client is some where in New York, ship can sail to New York and stay there until the procjet done. You may feel that this is beyond the imagination, but ts not a joke, its real. No kidding. Two California entrepreneurs are developing this idea with name "Code Boat" and expected to be in water by the end of this year. Read more on this here Lets wait and see whether this idea impacts the Indian outsorcing revenue or it bombs like dotcom? What do you think !!!

RFID in SD Cards, wow!!!. So you can turn your phone as RFID device!!!

2005-04-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

Assume one makes RFID is SD cards! That means any device which has SD card slot can turn as RFID device, Right!!! Wireless Dynamics Inc, a Canada company has offered up new technology that will allow smartphones and personal digital assistants to serve as RFID readers/writers. The new card will also offer Near Field Communication (NFC) compatibility. The card integrates RFID functionality into the existing computing power and connectivity of PDAs and smartphones. RFID tag information can be communicated in real-time through WiFi, CDMA, GSM or Bluetooth connections. Know more about this product from their web site.

Can Skydivers play wireless games with gaming devices while freefalling? May be

2005-04-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

It could be possible, but what about the risk? Lets forget about the risk some time. So do you think its fun? Wireless handheld gaming device manufacturer Nintendo DS experimented with four sky divers to discover the outer limits of the wireless capabilities of the DS and its highly touted new competitor, the Sony PSP. They proved that an ad hoc network set up using the wireless functions of a Nintendo DS works perfectly at distances of nearly 400 feet while falling 120 miles an hour. Another experiment they did was playing their PSPs on moving trains, each member in a different car. Again, they found that at distances of more than 300 feet they could keep on battling, though the devices worked better with a clear line of site. Dont try your self, these are part of internet-only videos, From the Shadows, which will be distributed exclusively through BitTorrent. The series focuses on the unexpected things people do with off-the-shelf products.. Check the pictures

1Gbps broadband launched, not in US, its in Hong Kong

2005-04-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

Internet users in Hong Kong can now browse the internet at speeds that the rest of the world only dream about. Hong Kong Broadband Network has launched a new ultra fast service. The 1Gbps service costs approximately $215 per month. Can't afford that much? don't worry, other plans include 100MBps for $34(For the same price around, in my area Verizon offers Broadband service with 3 Mbps) and 10MBps for $16. Large publishers could offer direct download services for their games, online gaming could be revolutionised and TV channels could be streamed at MPEG-2 DVD quality. You can downaload the games with the blink of eye. Hong Kong Broadband Network is also deploying new hardware that will enable the convergence of voice, data and TV services; it will be able to deliver up to 200 pay-TV channels at MPEG-2 DVD quality. Well when can we get this kind of Broadband service in US? No plans that I am aware of!!!!!

View images(or any content) from your home computer on Mobile Phone or PDA or any device

2005-04-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

A startup company Avvenu lets you remotely access your computer with a mobile device, or even sharing content from your PC to family and friends. The service is still in beta, and if you sign up now to be a beta tester then you will receive a free year of service. Avvenu has a Smart Viewing technology that scales images to the correct size of your mobile device display for faster viewing. All you need to do is download this software and sahre the content you want, then you can access the content from any device(phone/PDA/Computer) that has a browser with internet connection. Ofcourse your home computer should be connected to internet and this software will take care of the security. Try it out!

Another piece, Gas Station Wi-Fi

2005-04-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Check this news piece, Gas Station Wi-Fi Changes Meaning Of 'Full Service'

Did I talk about Wi-Fi in cars in my previous blog? Well here it is ......

2005-04-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

In my previous blog, I mentioned about the Wi-Fi in buses and cars. After 2 days of this, WLAN vendor Telabria unveiled a public access point that can make this possible. This device uses 3G cellular data service to connect users to the Internet, enabling access by Wi-Fi-enabled devices from unusual locations like bus, coach or taxi. Check this piece from Mobile Pipeline

Municipal Wi-Fi - Verizon CEO says a dumbest idea!!! what do you think? I disagree

2005-04-17T14:02:00.000-07:00

In last October I mentioned about the San Francisco municipal Wi-FI. Soon after Philadelphia decided to go municipal Wi-Fi, Minneapolis followed. It won't take much time to see all US cities following Philadelphia, Minneapolis. I wish that could happen very soon. Isn't it good idea of having the internet connectivity everywhere? Don't you think that makes life better. Definetely, when I heard first about the internet in Seattle downtown, I thought it will expand to the whole city. Now its happening. A good welcome change in my perspective. Today I was reading this artilce from SFGate, where Verizon CEO quoted "that could be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard" about the municipal Wi-Fi. I disagree with his statement. He might have worried about the upcoming business threat. Assume if one is giving the municipal Wi-Fi access for $30 around(San Francisco is considering free municipal Wi-Fi. See my earlier blog). who will go for the Broadband for the same price. Definetely I am not, rather than just getting internet at home, for the same price if I get the internet wherever I go in the city, who will opt for Broadbond. He may be worrying about this and sees upcoming business threat, but I am not. I beleive municipal Wi-Fi is a very good idea. Tail piece : It all started with downtowns and expanding to cities. I wish it will soon expand to freeways, public visting spots like canyons, campings, lakes etc. If I am not wrong we all hear about freeway Wi-Fi, canyon Wi-Fi, camping Wi-Fi, lake Wi-Fi very soon. Not only this, we already heard about Wi-Fi in trains and fights, no wonder if we hear Wi-Fi in buses, cars and cruises in future. Another update : I stumbled on this today ofcourse it was too old, The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) kicked off with Wi-Fi at twin rest areas on US 287 in Donley County and free wireless service at two rest areas on the same highway in Hardeman County. So the rest area Wi-Fi is already in action. Whats next? freeway Wi-Fi? Watch out.....

Podcasting on Mobile Phones, Here it is... Motorola iRadio is comign soon.....

2005-04-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

Today I received a mail from one of my friend(Kiran Mudiam) who is working at Motorola. After reading my blog on Podacasting, he sent a mail saying that he is currently working on the similar project called "iRadio" and Motorola is rolling out this soon. iRadio is similar to Podcasting. Apparently I didn't know about this iRadio service when I posted. Thanks to Kiran for pointing me to "iRadio".

Podcasting.... audio-friendly RSS aggregators..... from MP3 players to Mobile phones

2005-04-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

Delivery (downloading) of an audio broadcast to a portable player, such as an iPod or any other MP3 player is Podcasting.With the help of desktop application, users can synch their iPod or MP3 player with their PC and walk away with the latest, saved broadcast package, which they can listen on their daily commute. Or you can get from weblog that delivers sound files instead of text directly to your computer and then to your Mp3 palyer.You can subscribe to podcasts by using a free audio-friendly RSS aggregator application such as Doppler, IPodder, or Nimiq.BBC has already started podcasting Five Live's weekly sports quiz, Fighting Talk. So its growing!! For Mobile Phones!!!!! Yes, soon you will see number of phones that equipped with audio players. If one has audio player on the mobile phone they can use the Podcast. While many carriers around the world are attempting to become content creators, so operators could download "morning shows" or news programs overnight to devices. Just as satellite radio companies are signing exclusive deals with broadcasters and sports leagues, so too could operators. Of course, they could also just stream this type of content, but the end user concerns about bandwidth and the coverage. So there is a value in having it pre-loaded on a device and not having it dependent on network connection. Think about the people when they are out of the coverage area, isn't it the good idea of giving downloadable option rather than streaming!!!!! I bet the end user likes this option in future.

StAX, an alternative to SAX parser. Why you need to push the elements? you can pull now with StAX !!!

2005-04-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

Why you need another parser? DOM is good for reading and validating XML documents.For large XML documents DOM consumes the memory and processor because it loads entire document into the memory. On the otherhand SAXParser is faster and uses less memory than the DOMParser. SAX uses the streaming approach, with this the XML infoset is processed in a serial manner, once an element has been seen its state is discarded and may be garbage collected. Only the infoset state at the current point of the document is available at any time, which clearly limits the types of processing. SAX defines how to do XML push parsing and is very well doing when one needs to process only parts of XML rather than entire document. Unfortunately, the SAXParser drives the client instead of client driving the parser. In other words, rather than being called by the parsing application, the SAXParser calls your handler methods for each component.Some says(including me) it is poorly designed. XML pull parsers overcomes this problem. XML pull approach With this approach, the application tells the parser when it wants to receive the next data chunk rather than the parser telling the client when the next chunk of data is available. In other words you are pulling the component yourself rather than parser pushing to you. In XML pull the client is in control rather than the parser. XML pull parsers XPP developed by Aleksander Slominski of the Indiana University Computer Science Department Enhydra's kXML parser Disadvantages with XML pull parsers Existing pull parsers don't support validation and namespaces. So it does not model XML correctly. Second, they lack a standard interface, so you write code specifically for a particular pull parser API. XML Pull API XML Pull API is a common interface for the XML pull parsers. Stefan Haustein from the kXML project and Aleksander Slominski from XPP3 (XML Pull Parser), both worked on common interface in December 2001. The resulting API reflects their substantial experience, drawing from their respective projects to produce an approach that works well for a wide range of applications. Disadvantages with XML Pull API But API is not object oriented, it has few classes(one class, one interface, one exception and one factory class) and all logic is implemented one class XMLPullParser. Again there is no support for XML validation and namespaces. The complete solution, StAX After a few years BEA Systems in conjunction with Sun, XMLPULL developers Stefan Haustein and Aleksandr Slominski, XML heavyweight James Clark, and others in the Java Community Process worked on the next generation parser with the specification JSR-173. The result is StAX, a parser independent pure Java interfaces that can be implemented by mulitple parsers. Advantages with StAX StAX parser uses very less memory like SAX and simplifies the code. More than one document can be read by an application simultaneously with just a single thread. You can skip parts of the XML document which simplifies your code and may reduce processing time and saves memory. You can parse in an object-oriented way that are efficient and simple to use. StAX implementations Reference Implementation (RI) at codehaus WoodSToX is a Open Source XML-processor written in Java BEA's StAX parser Oracle's StAX parser Comparison between DOM, SAX, StAX DOM Parsing Pros: * Easy to use * Rich set of APIs for easy navigation * Entire tree loaded into memory, allowing random access to XML document Cons: * Entire XML document must be parsed at one time * Expensive to load entire tree into memory * Generic DOM node not ideal for object-type bindingÑmust create objects for all nodes SAX Parsing Pros: * Entire document not loaded into memory, resulting in low memory consumption * Push model allows for registration of multiple ContentHandlers Cons: * No built-in document navigation support * No random access to XML document * No support for modifying XML in place * No support for namespace scoping StAX Parsing Pros: * Contains two parsing models(cursor and iteratore), for ease or performance * Application controls parsing, easily supporting multiple inputs * Powerful filtering capabilities provide efficient data retrieval Cons: * No built-in document navigation support * No random access to XML document * No support for modifying XML in place This is introduction only, soon I will go through the API and some samples. If possible, I will benchmark processing time and memory usage of the three parsers with some samples. Stay tuned......

Firefox Is Heading Toward Trouble! On the other hand IE 7.0 is gearing up!

2005-03-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

I can't digest this!!! Firefox is definetely a good browser and heated up Microsoft to work on new version of Internet Explorer. Looks like the Firefox developers are going thorugh some serious issues, which might cause Firefox to end with the current version 1.0.1. Check this eWeek artcile for more information on this. On the other hand Microsoft is polishing thier Internet Explorer to fight with Firefox. With code named 'Rincon', Microsoft is revamping IE7.0 with new features. The spec of IE7.0 started leaking out on the web already. As per rumors floating around, the new version includes 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, built-in news aggregator, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing and security. Check this article for more info on IE7.0. To conclude, eventhough Firefox ends with the current version, it made Microsoft to come up with the better version of IE. Down the road if we experience the best features in IE, then the credit goes to Firefox.

Bluetooth Sniper Rifle, well you can build on your own

2005-03-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

Remember the DC area sniper attacks! Oh boy that was scary. Anyway, what if you keep this Bluetooth sniper rifle in some place and operate it by another Bluetooth device remotely. Don't you think this is scarier than DC incident to imagine? What happens if one uses this sniper rifle? Will FBI agents search for the people who has Bluetooth devices in the spot to figure it out who operated the rifle? Fortunately thats not about this rifle. But never know, one can build this in future! The good news is, this is not a weapon. Its a device that can scan and attack Bluetooth devices from more than a mile away. The Wireless Security section of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's (SIG) website describes several types of Bluetooth attacks, but says Bluetooth devices must be within 10 Meters of each other for the attacks to occur.. Well the makers of this rifle broke that. Now Bluetooth SIG is looking at this seriously. It has a small computer which eliminates the need for lugging around a heavy laptop just to gather data. In a recent test run at downown LosAngeles, it didn't take long for the MAC address of Bluetooth devices to appear on the laptop's screen. And when they pointed the rifle at US Bank / Library Tower in Downtown Los Angeles, more than 20 Bluetooth devices appeared on the screen in less than few minutes. It seems with multiple guns, it would be possible to track a single Bluetooth device as the person walked around. If you're so interested, they'll show how to build your own rifle.

I am busy......

2005-03-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

As I am busy(extremely) with my current assignment(frontierairlines.com) at Sabre, I couldn't post anything lately. I will be back soon.....

Gates world's most spammed person

2004-11-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

I cant beleive why people waste their time by sending spam emails. What they will gain by sending a mail to Bill Gates? Will he check his spam mail and apply for credit repair or buy soe inkjet catridges? Targeting a common user with spam might help the buyer to raise sales. But targeting the Bill Gates will never helps!!! I couldn't beleive that he is receiving 4 million emails per day. No wonder why he has separate department to scan all his emails and filter the spam mails. Its not joke. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer told about this. Read more...

Microsoft launched new search engine

2004-11-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

I spent a little bit time on Microsofts new search engine. It has to improve lot. I dotn know when it can beat Google. I started testing with my name "Hari Gottipati". It returned only 5 to 6 results that are relevant to me. If you try the same query in Google it returns the lot of results, also it shows the proper results. I like the Googles index algorithm because it shows the most visited site as first result. Google started showing my recent article as first result when I search for my name. Even yahoo is unable to do the good job, but results wise its better than Microsoft. Its not just my opinion, the Times online reported the same problem. Lets see how MSN will beat Google in near days!!!!! Take a look at new MSN search

Is Microsoft Crawling Google Results For New Search Engine?

2004-11-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

The old msn required a fee to be crawled by its spider. But a few months back MSN dropped the fee and said they were going to begin crawling the entire web and doing it without charge. However, that's no easy task. So I believe MSN is using the results from Google and possibly even Yahoo to get all of the pages they've indexed on sites that have a relatively low page count in the current msn search engine. First off, that's the fastest way to get the relevant pages from a web site. Sure they could just go to the site directly and start crawling but in doing so they're going to get tons of duplicate urls and urls that seem different but point to the same content. Crawling Google's results will eliminate the bandwidth to some extent but will not completely take care of the duplicate content issue their spider will encounter. Secondly, crawling Google's results can act as a qualitative measure for their new search engine. By creating a baseline number of pages per site when the new Microsoft Search is launched and running a comparison on a regular interval for the next 6 months, they'll be able to determine internally if their engine is finding and indexing the same links and as many links as Google. Call it competitive analysis or whatever you want. By Jason Dowdell at webpronews.com

Tech's Top 10 Trends

2004-11-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

1. Web services will evolve and create new businesses 2. Patients will demand online medical records 3. Corporate computing won't see big changes for at least five years 4. The next big tech innovation will come out of China 5. Blogging and other online content will force traditional media to change 6. California will lead the world in embryonic stem-cell research 7. Text messaging will become more pervasive 8. New consumer technologies will appeal to more than just young hipsters 9. Every consumer-electronic product you own is about to become obsolete 10. Utility computing will keep tech spending strong " Read more

Divorce wife by e-mail, SMS is valid?

2004-11-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

Rahat Iqbal married Rubab in 1998. He left for the US shortly thereafterafter, promising to call for her in three weeks. Six long years later, she received her official email notification of divorce from the absent Rahat.Clerics are now debating the validity of Rahat's e-divorce. Maulana Khalid Rashid stated that since emails contained no signature, the husband would need to authenticate the missive - preferably by calling her to confirm his intentions. Furthermore, the email must adhere to the "triple talaq" principle - whereby a wife can be disposed of if her spouse repeats "talaq" ("I divorce thee" or thereabouts) three times. However, Maulana Akhtar Raza Khan decreed that "divorce should be handwritten and the wife should recognize the handwriting", thereby putting paid to the digital quickie divorce. Furthermore, Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawad considered email termination "absolutely illegal", adding that the triple talaq scheme is widley accepted only among Sunni Muslims. Read more...

10 days, more than 10,000 donors, collected more than $250,000 for full page ad in NYT about Firefox browser

2004-10-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Just 10 days, more than 10,000 donors, collected more than $250,000 to give full page ad in Newyork Times about Firefox. Amazing, looks like Firefox os going to Rock in near future. Not only the users interested about Firefox, they are interested about letting others know about this innovative browser. So with the help of all these efforts, I have gut feeling that surely one day Firefox will shake the Internet explorer. The NYT campaign has now closed. But the Firefox 1.0 launch is just around the corner - Firefox needs your ongoing support to spread the word. This campaign drew on worldwide support from over 80 countries including Jordan, Gibraltar and Estonia.

Dont place ur photo at work in blogs, u will get fired !!!!!

2004-10-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

A Delta Airlines air stewardess has been suspended without pay for including photos of her in airline uniform on her weblog. She received no warning or request to remove the pictures until she was called to a meeting 6 October and suspended without pay or health benefits. Delta described the photos as "inappropriate" and said the suspension would last until their investigation was finished. The blog was a fictionalised account of her life and work. She described the airline as Anonymous International Airlines, herself as Queen of the Sky and her hometown as Quirksville. Queen of the South, or Ellen Simonetti according to the BBC, fears the company will suspend her indefinitely until she quits. She has filed a discrimination complaint against Delta with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Simonetti told the BBC she could not understand how Delta thinks the blog damages the airline. Check her blog. Read more .....

IEEE1394-Compatible Multimedia Car from Nissan

2004-10-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

Nissan is displaying a new prototype vehicle at this year’s 11th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems that incorporates a multimedia platform capable of showing up to 4 moving images on an onboard screen at once. The prototype is designed to explore future developments in vehicle safety equipment, convenience features and in-vehicle entertainment. The car is fitted with one monitor in the front and another in the rear seat area. Depending on the chosen mode, the front seat monitor can display up to four images at one time from seven different cameras mounted at the front, side and rear of the vehicle, giving the driver all-round visibility including blind spots. Simultaneously, the rear seat monitor can show DVD images. The multimedia capabilities are made possible by the adoption of a high-speed 1394 optical fiber network communications system which allows a data transmission rate of 400 Mbps (mega-bits per second). Whereas conventional analogue cables are only capable of transmitting one image, the optical network communications system allows the transmission of multiple images. Read more .....

Google says "No portal"

2004-10-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Google is not interested in re-starting the browser wars nor is it about to become a portal, says chief executive Eric Schmidt. Speaking in today's FT, Schmidt said the firm would not take on the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo! by setting up a portal. Both ideas have been suggested as ways for Google to extend its brand and defend itself against competing search engines. Observers worry that Google is open to competition in the market for searches and related adverts. Microsoft and Yahoo! both have plans to include more search technology into their portal and email offerings. Yahoo! bought search specialist Stata Labs last week. Schmidt told the paper that the search engine market was still young enough that there was room for several companies. He said Google did not need to shape strategy on a defensive basis. He said: "At this stage, the focus has to be on your customers and your own strategy." Read more...

Return of the Browser Wars, open source users planning for full page ad about Firefox browser in NYTimes

2004-10-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

Over the past two years, Firefox has grown from a concept to a full-featured browser that has been downloaded more than five million times. Along the way, Firefox users have grown to a mass of vocal advocates. How vocal, you ask? Well, they’re currently taking up an online collection to buy a full page ad in the New York Times to tell the world an alternative exists to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Chris Messina, a Web designer and one of the people behind the movement at SpreadFirefox.com, says the release of version 1.0 is “our Tea Party. We’ve been handed these other Web browsers and they haven’t been innovative. We want to show people there is an alternative.” “Release 1.0 is the biggest Internet news in terms of browsers in a couple years,” says Rob Davis, executive director of PlayPolitics.org and the man behind the New York Times ad campaign. There’s good reason Firefox users double as Firefox advocates. The browser was built from the ground up to protect against the top two scourges of the Internet: viruses and spyware. Firefox eschews the more virus-prone technologies found in Explorer, such as Microsoft’s ActiveX. “Avoiding ActiveX is a big advantage,” says Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the SANS Institute, an international Internet security organization. “A lot of vulnerabilities come from Internet Explorer’s using ActiveX, which is tied tightly to the operating system.” What’s more, unlike Explorer, Firefox won’t automatically open a link that’s an executable file (the most common file-type for viruses and Trojan horses) without alerting the user. Read from TechnologyReview

San Francisco Aims For Citywide WiFi

2004-10-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

"No San Franciscan should be without a computer and a broadband connection."-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. But I would imagine the whole world instead of just San Francisco. But every thing has to start as samll and then slowly it grows like the internet(connected). If you get the Wifi access everywhere life will be easy. YOu cna check ur email everywhere and u can get the directions when u r struck somewhere etc. Anyway atleast now San Francicso will be getting ready to offer WiFi through out the city. Its a good move. Now I am thinking to move to San Francisco. Coming to the news,San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom set a goal Thursday of providing free wireless Internet activity in his city that sees itself as a vanguard of the Internet revolution."We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service," he said in his annual state of the city address. "These technologies will connect our residents to the skills and the jobs of the new economy." More From CNN

Hotmail increased the storage size to 250MB finally

2004-10-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Finally hotmail increased the storage capacity to 250 MB. Today morning when I was checking my hotmail account, I saw 1% of usage instead of 85% usage. For a second I thought that I lost all my emails, but later realised that they increased the limit to 250 MB. Though its late compared to Yahoo, but now I can use the same email address with more storage limit. Its worth of waiting, because I am using this email address from a long time and I don't want to switch to other email address.

Sun Settles Kodak's Java Patents Suit for $92 million

2004-10-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

The latest tangle over software intellectual property stemmed from Kodak's claim that Sun's Java programming language infringed on three software patents held by the Rochester, N.Y., company. Kodak acquired the patents on object-oriented software programming when it bought Wang Laboratories for $260 million in 1997. Kodak sued Sun in February 2002, and the Java community got a jolt last week when news hit that a federal district court jury in Rochester had upheld Kodak's claim in an Oct. 1 decision. Kodak had sought $1.06 billion in damages from Sun, and the verdict raised two questions: Could financially struggling Sun afford to pay such a large award? And what did the verdict mean for the larger Java community? But just as the trial's penalty phase was about to begin, Sun settled, agreeing to pay $92 million for rights to the Kodak patents. The settlement protects not only Sun but companies that license Java from it against future legal action or demand for royalties by Kodak, according to Sun. "The settlement assures customers worldwide that Sun will stand behind its products and intellectual property," the company said in a statement. Major vendors of Java-based products, such as BEA Systems Inc., have Java licenses from Sun that are protected, too, according to Sun. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft already have licensing agreements with Kodak that cover the patents in question. Just how far the settlement will protect all Java users isn't clear. Large companies--heavy users of Java for internal applications--typically don't seek a license from Sun. Also, Java is a hidden component in an increasing number of products and services, from cell phones to truck-scheduling systems. Deciding where a given company makes commercial use of Java might depend on how aggressive Kodak plans to be going forward. Kodak declined to comment on the possibility of more Java-infringement lawsuits. Extracted from the InformationWeeks article Intellectual Property - The Cost Of Ideas.

My Web, a personalized search from Yahoo

2004-10-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

Today yahoo launched beta of My web, a personalized search. So I was so curious to see what features they have!!! Well they made it little bit different from Googles personal search. features includes : Save the results you like. Block the ones you don't. Share what you've found. Find anything you've saved. When you search some thing you will get list of results. For each result, you see the links of Save, Save with Note, Share, Block site and if the result is RSS feed you see the links of View as XML and Add to My Yahoo(Beta). Its cool. You can categorize the results by adding them to the folders. My web allows to manage all your saved results in the manner you want. Take a look at My Yahoo Search

Four-in-One Radio, single chip that lets cell phones jump between different types of networks

2004-10-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

All over the world, and most recently in the United States, cellular companies have been upgrading their networks, moving from so-called second-generation, or 2G, technology to 3G systems that can deliver vastly more data at faster rates. Throw in the growing number of Wi-Fi connections, and mobile phones, PDAs, and other devices must contend with a tangle of networks speaking different languages at different frequencies. Since most wireless devices can handle only one of these languages and are permanently tuned to particular frequency ranges, they’re unable to communicate outside limited geographic areas.But a University of Waterloo, Ontario, startup called Sirific Wireless is developing a new chip that will enable wireless devices to use four wireless standards and tune to different frequency ranges. Such devices would be able to hop between networks looking for the fastest available data connections, regardless of location. More from Technology Review

Call Forwarding from land line to PC thorugh Wi-Fi enabled cell phone or PDA

2004-10-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

Technology Review reporting : In today’s mobile society, it seems people are hardly ever around to answer landline phone calls. But software developed at the University of California, San Diego, lets you take those calls on any Internet-connected device. A system devised by Andrew Kahng and Puneet Sharma enables a PC to digitize a phone call coming in on a landline and forward it via the Internet to a Wi-Fi-enabled cell phone, a PDA, or even another computer, so long as it’s also running the software. Outgoing calls made from the remote device can also be routed back through the landline, allowing a user to, for instance, avoid long-distance charges. Kahng and Sharma plan to commercialize the technology early next year.

Romance with virtual girl friend on the mobile phone

2004-09-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

For men seeking true romance there is now a new mating game with an unusual twist -- it is virtual and mobile.A fantasy world in which lovesick men can wine and dine a virtual girlfriend on their 3G phones is about to be rolled out in Asia and Europe.You will soon be able to download an artificial girlfriend, then track her movements via images on a 3G mobile handset. All the likely suitor needs to do is push the right buttons -- literally.Aimed at males between the ages of 15 and 35, the virtual girlfriend uses up a lot of bandwidth -- shopping, dining, going to bars and the gym.Men who wish to take the relationship further have to shower the virtual girlfriend with gifts, paying with real money.If an anniversary is forgotten, the player quickly discovers that their new "partner" is giving them the cold shoulder. Read more from CNN

Automatic Highlights from a Sports game

2004-09-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

Don’t have time to watch your favorite team? At Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China, computer scientists Hongjiang Zhang, Yufei Ma, and Gu Xu have developed software that automatically generates highlight reels from video of sports programs. Import the video onto a PC, and computer vision algorithms recognize objects on the screen, like balls or people. The software then identifies key events, such as the ball going through a basketball hoop or into a soccer goal. “Sport has grammar,” says Zhang, and the computer can use that grammar to organize its summary of a game’s important plays. Related software can also edit TV programs into segments of interest, such as news and weather forecasts, so the viewer doesn’t have to watch an entire broadcast. It’s all still being tested, but Zhang says these features could be part of Microsoft home entertainment software within a few years—in time, perhaps, for the 2008 Olympics. Look out, ESPN. Source : MIT's Technology Review.