Super Bowl - Heating up.

Much needed for chilly and snowy Chicago, already much trash talk from both sides from unexpected personalities. As per an unscientific survey, 51% people thinks that Pats going to win and 45% people thinks Giants. 4% people thinks game going to be tie(just kidding).

The talk of street is Tom Brady has faked about his foot sprain, just to confuse Giants camp. I don’t buy it since quality guy like Tom doesn’t require to fake or confuse somebody to win his game. He has solid QB abilities, good support from team so nothing he can achieve by faking, in fact if he is faking that would degrade his team’s confidence and they can’t practice well for Super Bowl.

First trash talk came from Mr. Plax(unexpected from him) that Pats going to lose by 23-17 score,which i strongly disagree. From Pats side it was Brady (again unexpected) that he just laughed and repeated the question about Plax’s prediction. So some fans thinks that Tom Brady is becoming arrogant. But that is also not true since he is already in 5th super bowl competition and he can jump earth to sky if he wants to, but he is not doing it and always down to earth. Plax’s predication is strong message to Pats because he is confidence with Giants D. Watch out Brady, your man Moss will be double covered all the time.

This time we have to thank Randy Moss for keeping quite all time since this season started. He was famous for lot of trash talking when he is with other teams. I think that he is true believer of Tom Brady and want to stay at Pats organization for long time.

What's Next?

Fed reserve cut interest rate again and this is second cut in last 10 days. The stimulus package was approved at congress and heads it's way to senate. So all the move has been done to curb the recession. This time all are acting very fast and timely manner. Because a recession is inevitable in coming months if not a slow down. As always Fed reserve released a statement after meeting, this time something is different that they didn't confuse people with complex sentences. From the statement, "The Committee expects inflation to moderate in coming quarters, but it will be necessary to continue to monitor inflation developments carefully." So question is how come inflation is still an issue because we are expecting a slow down, perhaps this was added because of one member opposed the rate cut. So it is looks like we would be again on track for economic expansion, that is, positive GDP growth before fall, well before election.

Apache Wicket : Everything is component.

If you have Java developers only in your project, here is a framework from Apache which enables Java developers to create web page. Apache wicket is fully programmatic way of creating web pages. No configuration files required. Validation, images, text in a web page can be reused. All can be reused multiple times in same project. Error handling is very rich and Java based. I think it is worth to see this framework, we can create a single web page within short amount of time by using this framework.
Here is link http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=IntroducingApacheWicket

Rise of Obama. What does it means to me?

If you see America from 30,000 feet above, you can only see hollywood movies, pop, hip-hop, madison street fashion and some unpopular wars. But real America is not this alone. Freedom is America’s fundamental, Equality is America’s blood, Industrial development is America’s heart. All you need is hard work or smartness to survive in America. This country is a gift to mankind. The whole world is revolving based on America’s economy; the same has to spread across each level of social issues and bring each human to upper level. Let’s hope Obama’s success will continue until he reached White house.

Who is listening?

Earlier, I often get discouraged by my wife, friends and relatives because they are not listening to me. Sometimes a small things required lot of effort from me to get things done as I want, for example, which movie to go? Where we want to spend our next vacation? But after getting little older and enough maturity now I know how to get things done as per my wish. This is called Persuasion. Persuasion is something everyone has within their soul, this might take some time and experience to use it fully and successfully. Persuasion is not something related to marketing for selling goods, we should not confuse persuasion with sales and marketing, In fact if you are sales man for GE, you might not need to use your persuasion to sell your rocket engine to NASA, because everybody knows about GE brand. Same with Japan auto makers because of price everybody comes to your show room without having to persuade. Persuasion is “You must convince others to take action on your behalf even when you have no formal authority.”

Persuasion required following 4 basic steps

1. Credibility: Collect both positives and negatives of your points. People will not ask only positives but negatives also. You should prepare for both side of argument.
2. Understand your audience: This is sometime you have to switch context and present different arguments that is one’s positive point now become negative now. I can’t persuade same way to my son as my wife. I can tell superman story to persuade my son but not with my wife.
3. Connect emotionally: You have to connect emotionally with audience to persuade successfully. You have to be enough smart and emotionally intelligence to adjust your tone and body language according to audience emotion state.
4. Don’t loose your position: You are persuading something’s because you are 100% sure that what you are trying to do is right. Your instinct tells you do so. If you have that instinct, just persuade persistently, until you hit the success. If you are not too confidence then don’t even try to persuade others. Don’t even think about persuade others by threatening them because no body will listen to you after that and your credibility will become a question mark.

Happy Republic Day.

Tomorrow India going to celebrate 59th republic day with much enthusiasm all over the country and especially in the capital, New Delhi.

Still India is youth and has to grow a lot to compete with other developed nation in this world. We grew a lot after 1991, after Manmohan Singh opened Indian market to all. Our main goal is to grow in all sector and eliminate poverty completely. After 2000, India is growing multi-folded with 8-9% GDP growth year over year. I was in Bangalore in 1998 and went back again in 2007, and I couldn't believe the amount of growth of this city. All main cities like Chennai, Hyderabad,Pune and Calcutta also growing the same rate as Bangalore. But still I witnessed a uneven growth in some places, that is mainly because of local people's and politician's unwillingness to accept progressive developments. It will take lot of time for them to change and join in modern trends.

CTSH - America's 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies.

Proud to be in one of America's 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. As a special note from Forbes "One company, sixth-ranked Cognizant Technology Solutions (nasdaq: CTSH - news - people ), has appeared every year since the inception of the list six years ago."

Here is more info http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/24/fastest-growing-technology-tech-fasttech08-cx_jr_pm_0124fastintro.html?partner=yahootix

I think Cognizant's success is because of following quote as they have lot of confidence employees,
WHEN YOU HAVE CONFIDENCE, YOU CAN HAVE FUN, IF YOU HAVE FUN, YOU CAN ACHIEVE LOT OF AMAZING THINGS

Devil's Advocate.

I enjoy debates and I love playing "devil's advocate". What is devils advocate? (from wikipedia) "a devil's advocate is someone who takes a position for the sake of argument. This process can be used to test the quality of the original argument and identify weaknesses in its structure." Each one of concepts/things in this world has both positives and negatives and we have to identify both and accept it if positive is more than negatives, otherwise just ignore them. I used change positions just for debates. The most popular one was about 3 years ago when we driving back to South Portland from NYC after a family trip, myself and my friend start debating about Indian educational system , I took the "good position" which was hardest to debate. After some time, I was debating with my wife the same topic but this time "bad position" which I learned from my friend's argument. I learned a lot from this debates. The most riskiest one was about 12 years ago, when I was travelling in train and train is full of Atheists from a famous political party, I was debating with one of their member by taking "theist" position, the debate went out of control after 2 hours or so and he got angry with me, he was ready to beat me with other members if I continue travelled in same car. 

But devil's advocate is good if you play with a mature enough to understand the basics of debates and curious to know about both positives and negatives of each concepts. Otherwise it would lead to a bad relationship or even a break up after the first meeting. My favorite topics are Atheism Vs Theism, Capitalism Vs Socialism, Democracy Vs Dictatorship, Real Estate Investment Vs Stock Investment.

Bloodbath from Dalal Street to Wall Street.

Today early morning DJ future index fell almost 500+ points and NASDAQ index fell more than 100 points and all across world stock markets crashed. I would say it is a free fall. For example, Australia’s largest online broker firm CommSec site crashed due to high volume of transactions. Indian stock exchange BSE halted trading for 30 mins since the grid overloaded with 10 percent drop with in first hour of trading. Being flat world has one drawback of this kind of ripple effect particularly in finance market. All this fear and chaos happened because of US economy which is world’s largest economy (21% of world’s GDP share) going to slip in recession. At last today morning Fed cut its leading interest rate to .75 basic points to 3.50 to rescue US market. Otherwise we would have witnessed a free fall in Wall Street also.
But as an optimistic investor it is good time to invest some “investable”(means saving and profit from last year investments) money into stock market. It is good time for bargain hunters. We can pump 10-15% of our “investable” money into market now and wait and see for remaining, and increase 401k contribution and ESPP to a little high to accumulate funds/stocks at low price. If you are pessimistic, just get out of this market and wait for sunny summer days.

ZK Framework for RIA.

Rich Internet Application going to rule web this year or coming years, as I blogged last week. ZKoss seems to me emerging open source framework to create Rich Internet Application and it is AJAX based. We experienced lot of pain when we used AJAX in our web application, the main issue is browser compatibility and maintaining state across multiple browser windows. So all technologists are bit biased towards AIR(Flex based from Adobe) for RIA. Good part about ZK is there is no JavaScript code required to create RIA, rather it uses a simple XML file (called zul files) to specify user interface and ZK takes care of client and server side AJAX processing. We no need to worry about all other AJAX pitfalls. ZK works with any languages such as Java,Ruby and PHP and easily portable across different languages. The web applications developed by using ZK is just looking like a desktop application. Here is more information about ZK http://www.zkoss.org/

So it's Yankees Nation Vs Sox Nation.

Baseball rivalry continues in Football also. Good that Giants made to final, I think that Giants going to help Pat's perfect season 19-0 at Arizona. The immediate beneficiary for this year superbowl is Fox TV since NYC team in final, TV viewership would go up. NY Giants deserve this win, because they have good players like Eli Manning, Brandon Jacobs and Plaxico Burress. They won most of their matches at road. Looking forward to see great super bowl match.

18-0 done and 19-0 is not too far.

Congrats Patriots again you have proved that you are the team of this decade. Great team play by patriots and are marching towards Arizona for final countdown. Today's match is clearly a team work ,no spectacular catches by Moss and throws by Brady. Defence played very good and converted all touchdown chances to field goals, which made lot of difference in today's match. I think game momentum changed when Brady faked a running game and gave ball to Moss for 12 yards run and again next game Kevin Faulk catched the ball and run for 10 yards. This two games changed Patriots chance in this match. Kevin Faulk is a great team player for Patriots, he can do whatever his coach asked him to do. He can be a running back, wide receiver, kick return, full back or sitting in sideline to encourage team. He is the gem for Patriots team. So without Moss-Brady factor, Patriots can win 2 games and now Patriots are in team play mode and easily they can beat Giants / Packers in superbowl.

Go Pats Go.

Indian Tigers eats Australian Kangaroos

So finally India won a test match at Australia after a long time. I was inspired by this title(Indian Tigers eats Australian Kangaroos) when India lost first test match, a leading Indian newspaper reported that " Australian Kangaroos eats Indian Tigers", good that now reverse happened. This team now is well blended and deserve for this win. Living cricket genius Sachin, Versatile Ganguly(sometimes aggressive and sometimes defensive depends on situation), wall like solid and tough Dravid, hard hitters Dhoni and Shawag, young and dynamic players Laxman, Harbhajan, Sharma, Pathan and Jaffer, last but not least Kumble (soon he is going to be highest wicket taker in world). So many more victories going to come for team India.

Ok..Back to Football, divisional finals are tomorrow and 4 strong teams and 2 winners. I don't know how Giants and Packers game going to be in this wild winter blast. Today we had a toughest day of this season in Chicago, today wind chill dips all the way south to -19F and really it was not pleasant even to stay at home. I don't know how NFL teams preparing players to play at this extreme cold.Clearly tomorrow games going to be interesting and all are looking forward to see Patriots Vs Packers Super bowl unless Giants really playing good in this extreme cold.

Why human walking in two legs?

I was wondering why we humans use two legs and all other animals use four legs to walk. I thought that I'm crazy to think about this kind of unwanted thoughts, but just before I googled it and found that University of Arizona did expensive research about this. As per research, we started walking in two legs about some millions years ago, and this is the first revolution of human kind. Our brain got much stronger because of this change. Because if we continue walking in four legs, we spend more energy for walking and lot of energy consumed by just for walking activity. Our brain itself consumes 20% of energy and if we stand up and start walk blood circulation to brain increases and more oxygen to brain hence we can generate more ideas. So after started walking in two legs,we advanced our innovation and science discoveries quite a lot. Just imagine if we keep on walking four legs and we spend lot of energy for walking, our blood circulation to brain decreases, and we can not advance like this. So if you want to generate more ideas, just walk and walk and walk, not four legs though.

Happy long weekend.

ADHD - Is it over hyped?

While browsing some science articles for last 1 hour or so, I found that there is increase demand of ADHD prescription in US year over year. This got me think,that we are over hyped with kids normal behaviour as ADHD. I know in adults, somebody would get blame if he or she finished their task well before expected time and out perform others in all way, which is, tolerable and it is pure non-sense of annoyed co-workers who unable to cope with fast paced work environment.
But when coming to kids part is not like that, we have to be very careful before consulting doctor. Nowadays kids are out smart than our generation, this is because of science and technology advancement. Each one has to carefully determine their kid's behaviour and make judgement based on there best knowledge after they get more complaints from school. Because this ADHD drugs are very addictive and cause some brain damage to kids. All of us working hard and making money for our kids future hence we can't jeopardize there future by our own hands.

SaaS success stories so far...

As I blogged earlier "Must read for software engineers", Sun announce yesterday that they are planning to move data center operation to SaaS and closing all in house data center by 2015.

If you want to be a leader.....

Leadership doesn't required any special skills. Any body can become leader at any time of his/her life. so try the following to find out you are ready or not. This might be fun but real truth hidden in each points.

1. Just show your fingers as gun and try to act like you are shooting everybody in and around you, this makes somebody thinks you are a maniac, somebody thinks that you are a crazy guy, somebody thinks that you are going to fire them. If you are successfully created multiple perception for same action then you can be a leader.

2. Read more and identify complex English vocabularies and use it appropriate time. If you are able to read more and your brain allows you to store much information, that's good sign for leader in making.

3. At least yell at your co-workers once in a week to straight up some things, makes you to become leader very fast.

5. Attend meeting on time and talk more unwanted things other then real meeting agenda, if it is really helps business to achieve something. You are ready, just rock n roll.

6. Just start talking with co-worker at first floor and get into elevator with the same discussion with same co-worker and you get out in a wrong floor, If the co-workers also follows you. You are already a good leader.

7. Even though you are defending 3+4=8, somebody try to correct you for more than 5 minutes. Just think that you are great leader of 2008.

8. Same time if you can talk with 5 people for various tasks and you are not doing anything, you are a true leader.

Must have product of 2008.

Here comes next cool product from Apple, the ultra thin MacBook Air .20 X .16 inch, like piece of paper laptop introduced by Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2008. The price is $1,766.00, but I think it is worth buying for this year. It looks like after 5-10 years all people in this world at least own one Apple product. Just see, Apple product performance in 2007, 4 million iPhones, 5 million copies of the Leopard operating system, 4 billion songs, 125 million TV shows, 7 million movies. Apple is biggest success of globalization, because they are designing and inventing new products here at California and manufacturing it from China. They are spending more money to invent more products and increase employee's head count. But there is no new products from Apple this year, that makes sense because now they have to concentrate on developing more features and services to existing hardware hence they can sustain this market. iTunes can support now movie downloads(big headache for Netflix), Apple TV can download HD movies directly without a PC, more feature for iPhone. Good this year started with excited news from CES and MacWorld, just we need to save some money and ofcourse wife's permission to buy all these in this year..

Rich Internet Applications.

2007 all about social networking Facebook,MySpace,Orkut,Pulse,LinkedIn,Ryze and many more. I think this year we are going to see rich internet applications(RIAs) going to rule internet world. Now most of households has high speed internet connection, already many sites embedded with video/multimedia content. AIR(Adobe Integrated Runtime) from Adobe systems enters mainstream and helps application developers to design and develop media rich web sites. Other RIA frameworks are Silverlight, JavaFX. AIR is a cross platform system runtime, enable to develop web sites using HTML/AJAX, Flex 3.0 or Flash. I think AIR has added advantage over others because it can easily integrated with J2EE, Java Web Services,Spring,Hibernate and it is open source and run smoothly on all browsers and operating systems. Here is more information http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air

Recession -Prepare for worst and hope for best.

Whether or not we are in recession now or will be in coming months, we have to prepare for worst and hope for best. This time main culprit for economy downtrend is real estate collapse and sky high gasoline price and credit card debt. Last time when I came to US within a year, tech burst happened and economy fall in recession, which was worst for Silicon Valley companies. Most companies in Silicon Valley went through several rounds of lay offs. But this time most of the IT companies sitting in huge cash pile so they don't need to go through lay off, may be some hiring freeze. We have to thank offshore and outsourcing model now, because most of IT companies saving lot of money because of offshoring, and helping US employees to keep there job now. Specially IT companies will not affect by this recession, may be some banks and real estate related companies going to affect.

By the way, playoff matches are over, as per my wish New York Giants and San Diego are in conference final. After several failures in last years, this year we are going to see some new competitions.

Playoffs - Divisional weekend.

Again weekend approaching with divisional playoff matches, this time all matches will be tough and each team have to fight hard to emerge as winner. My heart goes with Giants and Chargers. I think that Giants has more chance to win Chargers since Tony Romo had a bad December and Giants pass play would give Cowboys a little headache. Jacs match at Pats is really going to be cool game. Jacs defence is too good and definitely going to give some reality check to Brady and Randy. But anyway Pats going to win with hefty lead. Good games are ahead with great expectations.

iPhone - Radio Streaming.

One more feature for iPhone, FlyTunes application for iPhone, FlyTunes will provide radio streaming starting from Jan 21st, 2008 and it is free of cost. Check it out http://www.flytunes.fm/

2008 international CES Round 2

As 2008 CES winding down at Las Vegas tomorrow, Microsoft is clear winner for this year's show. Microsoft introduced quite a lot consumer electronics. Microsoft is going right direction to introduce these consumer electronics now because last year more than 70% of Windows Vista copies sold were premium editions, which include Media Center capabilities. It is good time to release consumer electronics to connect TV, PC, Digital Music, Xbox, Phone and even shaving razar(Just Kidding). The following are list of products from Microsoft.
Mobile Navigator - Really cool to get information based on image. http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13934_22-182336.html
Media Extender - enabling users to move digital media files from a PC to a TV. (from HP,Samsung and Netgear) wireless or wired
Windows Home Server - hardware to store home file, digital music etc, storage limit is 2tb.
Surface Computing - applications for drawing, interacting with media, and manipulating photos that are instantly taken from a digital camera.
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13934_22-182709.html

2008 International CES Round 1

As many of us know, 2008 international Consumer Electronic Show started in Las Vegas 2 days ago. This year as usual there are lot of new products and tech gears lined up to get attention from consumers. The one big eye opener is Panasonic's 150-Inch Plasma TV, yes I'm not kidding friends, this gigantic TV is 150 inches and you have to demolish your front door to get into your living room. At this point of time, Panasonic not announcing price for this TV, but it is advanced HDTV format. Because current HDTV format won't display good in this big TV.

I think this TV revolution going to continue another millennium, there is no end into it. In future, I think the whole TV screen going to change, and it is going to support 3 dimensional to 6 dimensional views. We have to dedicate a room for TV which going to fill up with plasmas or LCDs to display real time images as we can see it real 360 degrees and up and down.

Must read for software engineers.

Thanks to del.icio.us, I found this bookmark http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=157, this blog by Dion Hinchcliff describes 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008. SaaS (Software as a Service) going to knock our doors in coming year.

What is this SaaS? SaaS is nothing but on demand software service from vendor, which software need not be in same box in client machine. SaaS becomes a new way to collaborate, communicate and trade business. To put SaaS in perspective, here is good example, Amazon developed some robust reusable SoA web services which is highly scalable, such as Amazon EC2 compute cloud, Amazon Simple Queue Service. RightScale is a company which just builds platform to access Amazon web services. Now RightScale enabled SaaS for other vendors to reuse Amazon's web service, mainly non techanical users also can access this service with out knowing much details about Amazon web service.

The following are going to be next generation enterprise computing.
SoA - Connectivity which is interoperable, reuse, integration
Web 2.0 - User controlled, Social networking, open, Collectively controlled(Wikipedia)
SaaS - on-Demand network service provider, this could be same vendor who developed Web Service or 3rd party who integrates all web service to make it as usable package.

Just imagine what these technologies would offer to us, you can buy stocks or mutual funds from different countries across global stock markets at one click and manage it efficiently, you can publish family vacation photos to more than one web gallery sites. 

Slap on Indian Cricket.

As last week end was full of sports action packed from wildcard football to India Vs Australia 2^nd test match, there was a bad decision hit Indian cricket and shocked all over cricket world. Harbhajan Singh young and dynamic Indian cricketer was banned from 3 test matches; the reason is very troubling and unacceptable by any Indian cricketers and fans that he made some racial comments to only one non-white Australian Cricketer Andrew Symonds. But I personally think none of the Indian cricketer will do this sin. Because we fought decade and decades to overcome “racially motivated” issues in India and even in oversees. I don’t have to tell Mahatma Gandhi’s name here, because everybody in this earth knows about what happened in South Africa and then India during our independence struggle.

Apart from that, very bad umpiring, which cost game for us. As of latest news, BCCI (Indian Cricket Governing Body) looking to discontinue this tour all together and ordered Indian team to stay at Sydney. I think they have to discontinue this tour, because without India this cricket series not going to succeed. We have to show our power to cricket world, that how important we are and can’t with stand any silly reason to ban our cricketer. Sometimes we have to very aggressive to prove our point to all of cricket world. I don’t think there is nothing wrong by discontinue this tour.

Emotional Intelligence.

When I was watching today's football match between Steelers and Jacs, I noticed when steelers were 14 point deficient, the steeler's coach Mike Tomlin showed lot of emotions in side line and made his team to overcome all deficient and finally his team was leading by 1 point. But finally steelers lost the game though. But the fact is emotional intelligence playing a important role in sports, workplace and where ever we are working as team to accomplish a task. I did some research on EQ and found lot of good information's.

The main components of EQ are

Using Emotions

Understanding Emotions

Managing Emotions.

David Golman, author of Emotional Intelligence, defined “EQ” as an ability to understand one’s own feelings and to express empathy for the feelings of others. His studies showed that EQ is four times more likely than IQ to indicate your level of success. According to Golman, the communication skills responsible for EQ are:

1. Empathy (One must be careful not to confuse empathy with either sympathy,pity,emotional contagion,telepathy
   
2. Graciousness.
   
3. The ability to read others.
   

There is a possibility that high EQ person can be labeled as Sentimental(because of Empathy), Sensitive(because of emotionally helping others) or pushover(because of Graciousness). But the truth is EQ person are highly skilled and know how to out perform in team environments.

There is now strong business case for EQ and most of the Fortune 500 companies try to asses their employee's EQ level. Based on articles,unlike IQ, EQ can be improved and developed.

Here is link for more reading

EI Consortium

Playoffs - Wildcard weekend.

So finally playoff weekend around the corner. Tomorrow we have 2 good matches Redskins at Seahawks and Jags at Steelers. I'm excited to watch Redskins game because they are under-rated team in this season and they lost one of their team mate in the tragic event. I think Cliton Portis 's running game going to make difference in this game, because Seattle tomorrow going to be all wet thanks to west coast storm. Cliton Portis played really good game in his last 4-5 matches (i think avg. 86 yards per game) which makes the difference for Redskins offensive play. If you note Seattle's defense play was not that good as they were in first half of reg. season. Any way good luck to all teams to try to make second round. I hope everybody will enjoy this weekend.

Iowa caucuses

There is lot of buzz about Iowa caucuses in all over media. I don't know what is this caucuses? Why there is lot of attention to it? But lately I found that it is grass root of democracy, meaning people are selecting a candidate for a party to nominate for US presidential race. 

Wow...sounds great isn't it? So if more than one candidates are in one party to contest for US presidential race, who ever wins most of caucuses will be finally nominated by the party for presidential race. But still I don't understand how vote will be counted to find the winner for Democratic, for Republican it is straight forward.

Windows to Mac.

After a long time of planing and research, finally I bought my new MacBook last week. As a long time PC user, I was amazed by MacBook's desktop arrangement. Some where I read an article about apple, in that they mentioned that people in apple are "neat freaks" which is true after my experience with iPod, iPhone and now MacBook. I liked most of the MacBook's feature, but Spaces and Expose features are awesome. The pre-defined template from iWork also great, it is very useful for plannings and presentations(it took 5 minutes to create a sample presentation about history of Java, I presented it to my wife, really she liked it). One piece is missing is more finance planning templates. It is a very good experience with Mac, as I am learning day by day.