A Bold Move

Google says... "Without Orkut and Krishna Bharath -- and many, many other employees -- Google would not be able to offer innovative and useful new products to our users.Immigrations laws that enable us to attract and retain highly skilled workers, regardless of their country of origin, make that possible."
Google believes that it is in the best interests of the United States to welcome into US workforce, talented individuals who happen tohave been born elsewhere, rather than send them back to their countries of origin.....Not all companies would do so but google let government know what they believed in,Watch it here

Enterprise Mashups Made Easy

Forward thinking companies like Google always provide/introduce new APIs for community.If we are little bit creative,we can generate lot of Wows programatically!
But what if you are missing an API to a site you want to interact with from within your mashup or program ?(Even if a site has a public API, it might not do exactly what you want) What if you have a cool idea and you are missing the RSS or Atom feed you want from your favourite site ? What if you want to use parts of a sites user interface and functionality on your own site ?

Yes there is a way to deal with this problem now and keep your creative juices flowing .

Kapow Technologies is nurturing a developer community, openkapow, to accelerate mashup adoption .Openkapow.com is an open service platform, this means that you can build your own services (called robots) and run them from openkapow.com, all for free. These robots accesses web sites and allows you to use data, functionality and even the user interface of other web sites in a whole new way. No longer are you limited by what public APIs or RSS feeds that are available, instead you can build your own in minutes. You can then use those services from within your own mashups, code, Yahoo! Pipes, Google Gadgets etc.

New Version of Java Petstore 2.0 Early Access Released

The Java Pet Store 2.0 is the reference application for building AJAX web applications on Java EE 5. It illustrates BluePrints for using AJAX with Java, building AJAX-enabled JSF component libraries, using Java Persistence APIs, applying MVC and other design patterns in an AJAX web app, using Mashups such as Google Maps service for location specific searches of pets and PayPal service for purchases, using an RSS feed as a data source, and lots more.

MASHUP

Seriously, What the hell is a Mashup ?

Mashup is a new and innovative application/s that is made up of data taken from disparate sources on the web.

Here is an Example :
The U.S. Navy's Critical Infrastructure Protection Center is using Kapow's Mashup Server for a hurricane disaster-response system. The system queries the National Weather Service every 30 minutes for updates on hurricane activity and pulls them into mapping software. It also queries the Federal Communications Commission for data on cell tower locations and lays that on top of the map. Analysts can use the resulting mashup to predict which cell towers are likely to go down and make better emergency communications plans.

Other known mashups :

Craigslist + Google Maps=Interactive maps showing you apartments for rent or sale.
Google Maps + 911 Calls=Visual representation of where crime is happening in real-time.
Google Maps + Address book =Datagrid component with an embedded Google map.

Here are some more . . . .

Hoping to mash up something in coming days :)

James Webb Space Telescope

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is building The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.The Telescope,will study galaxy, star and planet formation in the Universe. In order to study how the very first stars and galaxies formed in the early Universe, NASA will look ‘back in time’ and deep into space using light time to travel from the present to the past. To study the earliest star formation in the Universe, NASA will observe infrared light, using special instruments optimized to capture this part of the spectrum.

How do you develop Software and Systems that will operate the James Webb Space Telescope? How do you deal with expensive and time consuming software issues ? How do you manage a multi decade project ? Apparently I don't have all answers but I just read from a press release that NASA is using IBM Rational Rose Real-time (to deal with the part of the problem ).Rational Rose Real-time, is a UML-based visual modeling development software.

Scripting language built on top of Java

What is SUN's answer to Adobe's Flash and Flex ?SUN do have a project that's under way -- and they are planning on open sourcing it fairly soon -- it's called S Bridge.It is a scripting language built on top of Java. Hopefully we'll get more details in coming months.

Web is a Mess

Bruce Eckel summarizes lot of things here ...his cross browser compatibility experiences , Java Installation issues, AWT failures and the ongoing AJAXification of the web .I can relate to some of the things he mentioned .In the end he feels Flex will solve the user interface problem.BTW, Flex is a way to develop Flash applications by programming.Iam not too sure whether everyone will agree ... Flex is not open source Bruce :)

Stale Newsletters

Being in Software Development Arena I am subscribed to atleast over a dozen technology related newsletters..something like Rick's Javalobby newsletter(If you have anything to do with Java probably you might know this) .The reason I subscribed to these news letters is to get latest/fresh content from those channels,which is the case with most of the newsletters.But not all newsleters are created equal...If you have subscribed to one of those newsletters from fawcette (ftponline)
then you might have noticed something different !! Half or more than half of newsletter is with advertisements and the annoying part is most of the articles are dated few months back or sometimes few years back.Ofcourse it is not a bad idea to send links to old articles (as long as the technolgy is not outdated) but they should have atleast one article or view which is new.

Trailfire

Trailfire enables you to discover the web through the expertise of others. Follow a trail and find what you need. Or share your own expertise by making a trail of web pages.Making trails is easy. Place a 'trail mark' (like a 'post-it' note) on a page with your comments. A trail mark can contain text, images, videos and other media types. When you give several marks the same 'trail name' you are forming your own navigation path on the web. We call this a 'Trail'. Trails can be private or public. Trails can be shared via email, by posting them on any website, or by publishing them on Trailfire.com.

The Faces of Web 2.0

entrepreneur.com says the following nine companies will impact the Web 2.0 movement in unique ways.

thinkfree:Provides an online office suite application
widgetbox:A self-service clearinghouse for a variety of different web widgets
hinchcliffe & company:Web 2.0 consultants
kickapps:A hosted platform for social networking and user-generated content
feedburner:The world's largest feed management provider
near-time:A hosted online collaboration environment that mixes wikis, blogs, calendars
spymac:The world's largest Mac enthusiast community
paltalk:A social networking company
37signals:A web-based software company

Have you graded your website yet?

Small Business Hub has clean interface to grade your website .Their analysis is pretty neat.

The WebSite grader attempts to measure both the ability for a website to attract traffic and the ability to convert that traffic into qualified leads and prospects. Their algorithm uses a unique blend of over a dozen different variables including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance and others.

The report tells you about

Google Page Rank
Your Web Page/Site structure
Domain info
Web Page Content (Links to Others)
Google indexed pages
Conversion methods (RSS Feed,Sign up Forms)
Inbound Links
Technorati Ranking
del.icio.us bookmarks
Traffic Ranking

I tried Grading Google which got 97/100 and yahoo which got 95/100 :)

Software Engineering Radio

I kind of got bored after listening to GURU songs continuously on my ipod for over a month and decided to check back on my podcasts.Its been a long time and people from Software Engineering Radio have couple of new interviews and Part 2 of Extreme Programming episode.If you too are looking for something technical...check them out !

Best of technology writing

The Best of Technology Writing 2006 brings together some of the most important, timely, and just plain readable writing in the fast-paced, high-stakes field of technology.

Open Source Business Plan

For consumers who want gadget personalization that's more permanent than vinyl decals, Adafruit offers custom laser etching of laptops, iPods, phones, cameras and more. It isn't the first company to offer laser etching, but it is the first to freely share its business model with other entrepreneurs interested in setting up a customization shop.

iPhone

iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Live Writer

Today I have read reviews about windows live writer...which said something like "Writer is Microsoft's first Live killer app" and could not wait to give it a spin.Lo here is my first post from live writer .Seems to be a really cool app.Is this going to put companies like this out of business ?

Who bookmarked me on del.icio.us ?

findout here .

Recycle Bin

Apparently windows was taking relatively long time to delete any file(move to recycle bin) on my work machine this morning ...a couple of minutes investigating the problem made me realise that the recycle bin was full which in turn was causing the slowness :).
Looks like Iam on a "Delete" spree these days...Deleteing all unwanted things in my life and in my computer.

word cloud

I had a word cloud made at Snapshirts. It analyzed all of the words I've used in my posts and gave emphasis to the ones I've used more often.