Join twitter and follow great people

Back in 2008 when I heard about twitter I didn't feel anything special and had the feeling that it is not going to make in difference.It was the same feeling some people still have about people that what can you express within 140 characters.I also had the feeling that most of the people using twitter are doing only meaningless chatter without any seriousness.(And it is in fact true as per some analysis). But as twitter became much popular by the beginning of 2009 I thought of just having a try and soon after joining I realized the fact the real value in using twitter comes from choosing the right kind of people and follow them.I know there are some people who thinks how to get maximum no of followers and I have seen many articles on that. But what I want to point out here how I benefited from twitter as a programmer. Also note that I am a budding programmer with just few years of experience and looking forwards to find some great people and make friends with.

If you are some one who is serious about tweeting and want to benefit from that what you should really concentrate is to find the right kind of people to follow. I as a programmer was more interested in programming and technology and I chose great programmers and techies as per my interests.Of course you might have the question how many good programmers are available in twitter. That is right ,it might be very less and you might even think that what is that they are going to tell in 140 characters.So you may think that following their blogs is a better option. Of course following programmer blogs is really great thing and it might be also correct that more programmers blog than tweet . But still you can find many good programmers who tweet actively and the difference between tweets and blog is that you may not blog on everything you come across. But you can tweet on everything you are involved and even though it is very short it might light a spark in your mind or make you to google about some topic. And they usually tweet about their blog post as well as well as other people's blogs which are interesting .Tweets can contains links of the topics they found interesting and there might be retweets of other people which are interesting. In that way you are in fact finding a bunch of people around a the topics you are interested with and can share your ideas as well. Don't you think this is much more than blogging and just following blogs.

Coming to people who may follow you it is very important for people to understand what you more interested in from your tweets. This will help to attract the right kind of people who you can really interact with. If you want some great programmers you are following to follow you also it is important that you tweet more about programming.If you are a person who are a frequent twitter user and tweet about almost everything I suggest have a separate account for more personal tweets. Making friends with some great programmers is really great ,but do it carefully and step by step by understanding the person and they shouldn't feel like a nuisance initially. I personally benefited a lot by joining twitter and following great programmers.So if you are someone still hesitant about joining twitter, break that notion, have a try and experience the difference.

CIO Resolutions for 2009 by Gartner

Gartner the leading information technology research and advisory company presents CIO resolutions for 2009 in the context of current economic downturn and uncertainty.Gartner says it will help CIOs excel and deliver better personal and team outcomes beyond their core IT agenda.John Mahoney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner says
"In time of a recession, organisations have more time for introspection that identifies what the deep needs are and also creates demand on what IT can do.t brings the opportunity for businesses to exploit the technology they currently have to create something new."

Gartner formulated all the ten resolutions for 2009 into four strategic themes.

1: Reinforce enduring strengths and assets
Start building an alumni network.
Stop being the exception that enforces the rules.
Start scouting for key talent.
2:Prepare for the next change, sooner than you think
Start preparing for the unexpected.
Start using social systems yourself.
Start taking cloud seriously.
3: Survive in 2009 without collateral damage
Stop ignoring people and opting for soft targets.
Start offering your vendors a free lunch.
Stop fearing the future; start driving it.
4 : Newer technologies to get experience of in 2009.

Reference
Gartner Presents CIO Resolutions for 2009

Nokia towards go green

It is a good sign that globally corporates are joining hands in the go green campain. In India too companies started adopting the environment friendly policies .This should be seen in the context of companies going for cost cutting measures in the period of economic slowdown. Companies found that efforts to save energy and avoiding wastages will not only save earth but will benefits the companies in the long run. A good move along this direction by nokia is worth noticeable.Nokia announced a plan to take back old handsets and declared that a they will plant saplings for each hand set returned.This is an appreciable move in the context of growing mobile markets in india and its result of alarming quantity of e-waste due to abandoned mobile sets. Also it is predicted that more people will leave their old handsets to buy new onces once the 3G services will come into effect in one month. Let us all join nokia to go green.

I Joined Ness Technologies India

22nd December was the start of another life in my career as i joined Ness technologies India ,Bangalore center.I was working in wipro technologies for the past 3+ years and it was a very good experience with one of the pioneer IT services companies in India.In fact it was difficult to part ways and I had a good collection of friends there.But it is inevitable to have a change and being in a different environment is always challenging and thrilling experience for me. The past 3 years I learned the starting steps to survive in the IT industry and gave the confidence to take a different approach even in tough time. It was a warm welcome I received in Ness and I hope will be able to meet the expectations of the new company.

Semantic desktop

The term semantic web might be familiar to you.But what about semantic desktop? Semantic web is a term often used along with "Web 3.0" the next generation of intelligent or executable web as it usually referred by people.Semantic web is a concept introduced by Tim Berners-Lee the originator of the WWW.The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale not as linked pieces of textual information that can be understood only by a human as it is currently.Although a lot of research is going on supporting the semantic web concept and languages like RDF is been developed the idea of the semantic web has failed to materialise in large scale as there is little incentive to create semantic content when there are few services that use it.The idea of a semantic desktop originated from this realization.
Semantic desktop is aimed to help people find and structure information on their personal computers and share it with others in a network.This will act as a stepping stone to achieve the vision of semantic web.The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence coordinated a project called NEPOMUK(Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)to develop a comprehensive solutions for the semantic desktop concept.The Nepomuk software, which consists of independent applications and plug-ins for third-party programs, prompts users to annotate it and establish connections between different information items. this can be integrated in third party application like desktop environments ,browsers and IDEs as plugins. Nepomuk’s semantic annotating and tagging system has been incorporated into the K Desktop Environment 4 (KDE) and works are going on for creating eclipse plugins and integrations into firebox browsers also.Let us hope this will lead us to materialize the vision of Web 3.0 and semantic web.
References
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
Science Daily,Wikipedia-Semantic web,Info mesh,

Seven wonders of the web

It is interesting to listen to a lot of discussions happening in the web about the 7 wonders of the web.I think it all started when guardian UK published it's list of 7 wonders of the web in Dec 27 2001. Google and yahoo were obviosely in the top of the list and others in order are Project Gutenberg,Multimap,Ebay,Amazon and Blogger. Obviosely if you look at these made a profound influence in the internet world.But if you look at now ,do you feel something else is mising or has to come in the list. That is correct!.I don't think there will be any argument on including wikipedia in the list. The wayback machine,google earth ,social networking sites and many more can be in the list.You can see many suggestions floating around the seven wonders of the web ,but there is no uniformity of opinion. It is obvious considering the way web is evolving over the years and its true dianamic nature to make anything history within no time.A wonder today might not be part of history at all tomorrow.

Gamma on Design patterns

As a sequence to the previous post i thought it is worthwhile to point you towards a sequence of interviews with Erich Gamma the leader in Gof design patterns.It is allways interesting and informative to hear from the creator/originator. Refer to the wikipedia link on Gamma below which has the links to the interviews.
Reference
Wikipedia