Notes at times

Join twitter and follow great people

2010-07-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-01-08T21:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-04T20:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T02:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T01:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-11T05:45:00.000-08:00

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

Object Oriented Design principles

2008-12-11T05:03:00.000-08:00

There is much hype about the design patterns in recent years and every one want to know design patterns or pretend to be experts in that. But most of them are not aware of the Object Oriented Design principles which are the base of any object oriented design. Design patterns provides a solution to most of the recurring design problems and basically does this by implementing good OO design principles. It is infact meaning less to go for design pattens before trying to understand the design principles. Design patterns basically leads you to apply good design priciples to solve your problem. These are the five basic design principles for object oriented class design .

The Single Responsibility Principle(SRP)-A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.
The Open Closed Principle (OCP)-You should be able to extend a classes behavior, without modifying it.
The Liskov Substitution Principle(LSP) -Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.
The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)-Depend on abstractions, not on concrete classes.
The Interface Segregation Principle(ISP) -Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

Apart from these there are 6 more principles about package cohesion and coupling betwean packages.Provided below some links in the reference section to learn more about them

Reference

Erdős number

2008-12-10T05:26:00.000-08:00

I was just reading the news of stepping down of Stephan hawking from the Lucasian professor of Mathematics in Cambridge University.I also came to know that Hawking has a Erdos number of 4. This evoked my interest to know more about Paul Erdos the great Hungarian mathematician.

Paul Erdos ,an immensely prolific mathematician has wrote around 1,475 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly with co-authors. This made his colleagues to coin the term Erdos number which indicates the collaborative distance between a person and Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.Erdos has a number of 0 his co-authors has number of 1 and their co-authors will have number of 2 and so on.

The origin of this term won't be astonishing if you come to know more about Paul Erdos and his contributions .He stands only next to Euler in terms of the volume of mathematical work.Erdos also known to be of exceptional character for whom possessions meant nothing and spent most of his life as a vagabond.He has once told "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book".The Book is an imaginary book that Erdos believes in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems.See the wikipedia article and related links on Paul Erdos for more details.
Reference
Wikipedia

Top 15 technology start-ups

2008-12-09T02:36:00.000-08:00

Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) honours Pioneer IT companies for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest caliber, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society. I just went through the list of companies and their innovative ideas and it is very surprising. I am listing some of them which i found very attractive to me.
1) Nivio
An indian company which is providing a vitual online desktops to users. This makes computing as easy and affordable as a Cable TV subscription.User have to purchase a monitor ,keyboard and mouse and a connecting device which substitues CPU. The difference is data is stored in the internet in a virtual environment.
2) Spinvox
SpinVox captures spoken messages and cleverly converts them into text. It then delivers your message to a destination of your choice – inbox, blog, wall or space.
3) Slide
Slide lets you use photos and other digital content to publish and make a slide shows and vedios.The company's widgets include slideshows, guestbook’s, SkinFlix, and FunPix. It also operates along with Facebook and Myspace.
4) Mint
Online free personal finance service. This helps users to automatically track and analyse their financial transactions, set budgets, and even send balance updates in text messages to cell phones.Only thing you need to do is register anonymously using a valid email address and give your account details. Mint automatically gets the account details analyze it and provide the details required.

See the kind of ideas which is transformed to better business solutions. You can see the complete list of 15 companies in the reference link.All are bright innovative ideas. One interesting thing you can notice is that young minds are behind most of these innovations.
Reference
Times of india

Some thoughts on India's moon mission

2008-11-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

One article came in Knowledge wharton in oct 16 2008 before the lunar mision found very informative. Describing various views on lunar mission ,its benefits and some criticisms it tries to explain what india is going to achieve my the mission. The criticisms were especially about the appropriateness of huge amount money being spent(386 crore) on this mission while a large part of the population is living below the povert line. But in light of its huge success and the confidence the indian scientific communinity gained by this mission ,and its far reaching benefits ,makes all criticisms week. It is sure that india gained a good position in the world space arena by this mission .

More lectures on mathematics from Gresham college

2008-11-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

As a part of creating the previous note on "Hilbert's questions" i was just going through the Gresham college site for more luctures on mathematics and found many other interesting lectures in the site. As the one mentioned earlier all these are a good collection of lectures and will be enjoing for any mathematic student .
Follow these link and you are there.
Past lectures on geometry

Hilbert's questions to the future

2008-11-19T01:41:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting lecture on Hilbert's questions by Professor Robin Wilson of Grasham college,London delivered on 27/02/2008."From Hilbert's problems to the future"
This lecture is very informative and simple to understand the famous Hilberts questions .Hilbert's problems are a list of twenty-three problems in mathematics put forth by German mathematician David Hilbert at the Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900.
References
Wikipedia

Euler's equation of degree four solved

2008-11-18T22:34:00.000-08:00

This post may be a little late(found in march 2008),but i just come across this .One of the unsolved problem proposed by Leonhard Euler in 1772 have a solution now. This problem asks for a solution in integers to the equation

a 4 + b 4 + c 4 + d 4 = (a + b + c + d) 4 .

Mathematician Daniel J. Madden and retired physicist, Lee W. Jacobi, found solutions to a puzzle that has been around for centuries. Please see this link for the complete story. It is very interesting.
This is related to another disproved conjucture of Euler .In 1772, Euler, hypothesized that to satisfy equations with higher powers, there would need to be as many variables as that power. For example, a fourth order equation would need four different variables, like the equation above. Euler's hypothesis was disproved in 1987 by a Harvard graduate student named Noam Elkies. He found a case where only three variables were needed. Elkies solved the equation: (a)(to the fourth power) + (b)(to the fourth power) + (c)(to the fourth power) = e(to the fourth power), which shows only three variables are needed to create a variable that is a fourth power.
95800⁴ + 217519⁴ + 414560⁴ = 422481⁴.

Largest prime number

2008-11-18T21:36:00.000-08:00

Good news for number theory enthusiasts. Two new larger prime numbers are discovered.
These are 2^37,156,667-1, and 2^43,112,609-1.Previousely the known largest prime was 2^110,503-1 discovered in 1988.
These are mersenne primes(primes which can be expressed as one minus a power of 2). Mersenne primes are very rare and till now only 46 numbers are discovered. For more details
see the GIMPS(Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) home page.GIMPS is a is a collaborative project of volunteers who use Prime95 and Mprime software that can be downloaded from for free from net to search for mersenne primes.
References
Wikimedia News