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Showing posts from June, 2008

WALL-E

Fantastic movie. Pixar’s one of the greatest movie, easily going to beat all previous records. The color combination, mixing, frame rate, and final smooth touch are excellent. It is hard to believe, that this is an animated movie. Very decent sci-fi story and greater in-depth animated color are the great success for this movie. This is Robot love story, movie starts from unlivable earth, because of over pollution, frequent dust storms and mountain of trash, where lone robot trash collector WALL-E (with his friend cockroach), just doing his job to convert all wastes into some deposable form for 700 years. All humans were evacuated from earth to space because of unlivable condition 700 years ago by various space ships. One of the space ship called Axim, sends a probe mission (like the one NASA send to Mars) to earth, that robot is EVE (but Wall-E calls her EVA), the mission is to find life in earth.Wall-E helped her to find a life, a tiny plant inside shoe. As soon as, EVA finds it and s

Struts 2 - Unit Testing

Somebody asked me to write a blog about unit testing for Struts 2. Cactus is the best test frame work to test any server side code. One advantage of Srtuts 2 is, action classes are no longer tied with servlet container and A)each action class is a single Java class in other words POJOs B)No mocking object required. Unit testing is very simple for Struts 2, that is, the main purpose of Struts 2 framework. We can use simple JUnit test framework to do Struts 2 unit testing. I recommend, very simple JUnit is better option to do unit testing for Struts 2.

Searching logic in illogical world

This world is full of illogical thoughts and events.Some times I feel that I'm the only one left alone in this planet with logical thoughts and finding hard to survive with this illogical. In last week alone, there are this many illogical events : Logic 1: Fix immediately whatever issues concerns you most (in context of lawmakers, it is whatever issues concerns to people of a country) US congress passed a bill to save monkeys on last Tuesday "unlawful for any person to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce any live animal of any prohibited wildlife species." Source: Chicago Tribune This is really important to tackle this issue now, because people now really enjoying with Midwest flood, high energy cost, foreclosures, credit crunch and worried about monkeys, dracula, snakes etc. Logic 2: Don’t talk too much about future, plan for it and take action for todays McCain announced that he is willing to give $300 Million

Heat on Outsourcing

Outsourcing/off-shoring is the 21st century modern global economy trends. It is something, sharing some work with other partner or company or an entity, which perhaps located other country/state from the main business location. The main purpose of outsourcing is to increase finance utilization and get more things done with less money. The main driver of outsourcing is currency inequality between two countries. After 2001/2002, tech bubble burst this outsourcing trend increased to several folds and more and more companies wants to “share” their work with foreign entities. After 6-8 years, outsourcing IT industry losing steam for the first time, this company’s stock price and value started plummeting. Why is that? This should not happen? Is there something fundamental wrong? 1. Big mistake with human resource: The main asset of outsourcing company is brain. Unfortunately, nobody can make brain “out of the box”. It is naturally embedded with each human. So human is the main asset of outs

Quit (7th time) Smoking

Yes. This is my 7th try to quit smoking and passed 96 hours. Last time, almost year ago, i tried and fell apart after 4 months. But this time something positive catalysts are working, they are A) new workplace, no smoking buddies B) i have a solid plan C) this is my father's day resolution to my kids D) i announced it thru blog so everybody knows it,now i have a morale obligation to follow what i preach :-) Previous times, i was not following solid plans, i didn't use "stop smoking aids" completely and once in a while, i smoked one or two puffs or a cigarette here and there. Most of the times, i quit because of external forces but this time "some force" triggering from internally. Last 96 hours or so, i felt like my sugar level dropped completely, dizziness, forgot to press correct floor number in elevator, food tastes bad and blah...blah...blah. i couldn't even blog, getting sleep at 8.00PM. But now all are back to normal, i can type blog and not sleepy

Yahoo,Microsoft and Google

Again Microsoft and Yahoo deal drift away and Yahoo going to join with Google as planned before. I have no idea why Microsoft targeted Yahoo, it is beyond our comprehension, especially technician like me. Microsoft has brain, products, track record and mainly power, as friend of mine pointed out, Microsoft wants a big presence in bay area to directly compete with Google, so they targeted Yahoo. Microsoft can build a new software facility and hire scientists within 3-6 months in bay area to ramp up their presence. But I think Microsoft really self-doubting themselves about their competence against Google, again it is all beyond our comprehension. Google's strength is cloud computing and Yahoo doesn't has one neither do Microsoft. I think Microsoft without cloud computing is biggest drawback moving forward. So without improving Microsoft's cloud computing capabilities, acquiring other big company will ends up in disaster. If Microsoft strategy is to just kill Yahoo products,

World War II – USSR Snipers

Last weekend i bought World War II DVD collection from Costco and watched all of them. It was horrible and weak hearted people should avoid it. I liked one good part is USSR army special unit snipers, they are the one who really led Stalin’s USSR to victory against Germans, second to strategy. I like snipers, when ever i play Xbox Halo or Medal of Honor video game, i get excited with sniper’s shooting mode. Because it is very hard to shoot somebody from distance with precise aim into their head. Snipers required special coaching and lot of practice, more than that, it was less expensive to hire somebody and give him training to make him as deadly weapon, rather than building a cutting edge military weapon which required scientists, technical and man power etc. The strategy was, snipers were placed everywhere at Moscow suburbs and their aim was to kill whoever driving military war tank, top commanders, and whoever wears top military stars, German military power collapsed sooner without

Stereotypes - Architecture point of view

Today morning i went to an indian store to buy chicken for lunch. One of my ex-colleague called me for a friendly chat. Since i'm in indian store, the context was set as business and india , he told me that recently he visited a suburb where 70% of business owned by a particular people from an indian state. I said yes their main core is business, but we (both of us from south india ) are good for project oriented jobs. Is it stereotyping or assumptions? As per architecture point of view, stereotypes and assumptions are really important to understand/build a new system but with in human systems based on stereotypes and assumptions "forcing" is wrong. My opinion is, a little stereotype, common sense and general knowledge is really required to understand a stranger and to build a good relationship or persuade others. The 3 combination of stereotype, common sense and general knowledge are success weapon to deal with most diversified cultures like india . For example, coup

Survived in new workplace for 15 days

Many of us try to join new workplace for various reasons and it is very tough to survive for first 15 days. Here i’m trying consolidating all my experience with survival of first 15 days. I started with a bank for contract to hire position, i liked this “contract to hire” concept because it very balanced act for us and company before both of us committing anything. Since it is a hiring position, added this is bank, i went through extensive security, background, credit, reference checking plus all kind of testing. This is important because all these process went through for 2 weeks before they asked me to start work, so patience is really important. I liked this also, so my manager knows my financial data and credit balance, did i bankrupt before, my credit score etc. Day 1: Hiring manager welcomes me and took me to my desk, what a surprise for me? All the equipment was ready, even my laptop booted and ready for login, and all stationary items are in place at my desk. I never ever expe

KidZui - Web Browser for kids

My 4 and half year old drives me and my wife crazy with his browsing habit, especially after school close. He knows how to start safari and go to youtube and search for "transformers" or "spiderman"( he knows if he types "t" in search box, first one would be transformers) to start watching video clips. We don't want to be strict about it because i don't want to raise him as "computer illiterate" or learn how to sneak in at same time, so we needed some protection. I know our trained software professionals must have thought about it and developed some kid's only browser, but i couldn't find one, that effective and intuitive. Today my wife found one from NBC Today Show, the kid browser KidZui , this is really highly intuitive and must have one. Very funny to see their team bio also. It is subscription based $50.00 / year.It has each kid's own avatar and over 600,000 kid friendly websites.The websites are regulated as per the age

HISTORY IN MAKING...

Finally Barrack Obama got Democratic nomination, he entered the auditorium with my favorite song "Beautiful day" from U2 in background. He just before ( while I'm typing ) announced that he got nomination with explode applause. I blogged some months ago, http://ibloggergeek.blogspot.com/2008/01/rise-of-obama-what-does-it-means-to-me.html , here. We are going to witness another historic moment, when he enters white house with the same support.

Optimism Vs Cautiously Optimism

These two words very often used in finance articles, particularly to describe investor’s thoughts about current market condition. I confuse with these and which context or situation we need to use these or follow these. In my mind, cautiously optimism was as equal to pessimism, which is totally unacceptable by capitalist’s thoughts. Capitalist and investors should not be pessimist, if they are then the whole progressive growth and world’s economy will melt like iceberg in artic. But later on I realized that these two are equally same meaning but the main differentiator is time to take a decision. If an investor is “cautiously optimist” means they are not willing to take any decision soon, such as invest on one company’s stock, they are analyzing the situation very carefully and closely, exploring various options etc. Where optimism means we tend to take decision on the feet, we think that this is the right time to invest, don’t delay, go for it and seize the opportunity. It is very har