Unified Modeling Language(UML) - Class Diagrams.

First 2-3 years in start-up, we are always in hurry to code new features based on hallway, coffee break discussions. No documents, no design and no formal code comments also. After some point of time, our products are out there in market and everybody liked it. Now comes the documentation trouble, we have to document all, whatever we designed and developed in past, primarily in our mind. If you are designer, you no need to write 100-200 pages document describing what you did. All we need are excellent diagrams, sketches and flow from start to end. UML is the only way to achieve this.

UML is not a strict language, in other words, there is no compiler out there to check our code against standards. A rough sketch can do the purpose. UML is useful on both forward and reverse engineering. The main component of UML is class diagrams, there is almost none design document without class diagrams. In class diagrams, the following notations and relationships are really important. This class diagrams are going to be a blue print for long time, hence this notations are important to communicate because we don't know whether designer who developed this diagram going to be with company or not.

1. Associations
In Class diagrams, if a class associate with other class, the a solid line with a arrow, from source to target. A perfect example would be, Customer and Order class. Order class must give a customer id, who created order. Since we can identify an unique customer id from order, Order class has an association with Customer class, that same with customer class also, from customer class we can find orders by the customers.

2. Compositions
A class can have other class's reference in it. This is useful when we want to utilize other class's methods without inheritance. Decorator pattern is mainly based on compositions.

3. Generalization
This is for grouping similar classes, to add these similar methods in a super class and all other classes are derived(inheritance) from it. This is nothing but super class and sub class notation in UML.

4. Aggregation
Aggregation and association are interchangeable. There is no major difference between them. A car has an engine, then car (whole) has a aggregation relationship with engine (part). To make our life simple, we can use association notation instead of aggregation. Most of the UML gurus discourage us to use aggregation notation in class diagram. We can just use association for top level design and composition and aggregation can be used in detailed design.

5. Realization
Realization is relationship between an interface and implements class. The interface specifies behaviours and a class implements that behaviour then the class realize relationship with interface.

6. Dependency
Dependency relationship as name implies, if one class change, other class's state changes then these two classes are dependency relationship. MVC pattern can be good example of dependency relationship.

The other important elements from class diagrams are multiplicity (upper bound..lower bound), Stereotype, visibilities and properties.

BPEL - Manipulating with XML.

In BPEL everything is XML, we are passing a XML to one web service and getting response from same. All manipulating of XML data can be done in BPEL by using local variables and flow. The main purpose of BPEL is to transformation between different web service.

XPath is standard way of manipulating XML data in BPEL. More advanced manipulation can be done using Java,XLST and XQuery. XPath is a simple language to navigate XML document to find a information from XML. But XPath is painful to do complex manipulation hence most of the complex logic can be done in Java or XQuery.

Following is from http://www.w3schools.com/
Here is a simple XPath Query example

/BookStore/book[1] - Selects the first book from BookStore element.
/BookStore/book[last()] - Selects the last book from BookStore element..
/BookStore/book[last()-1] - Selects the last but one book from BookStore element..

It is not necessary to remember all systex and commands, since now almost all IDEs has plugins to develop BPEL logic and complex logic can be done in Java as custom code.

BPEL - Anatomy.

Business Process Flow Lanuage consists of 5 major strucure. They are

1. PartnerLink - Reference to the services partcipants in the process flow and their ports/roles.
2. Variables - List of messages exchanged between the BPEL process and each of the partcipanting web service.
3. Flow Logic - The core of the business logic goes hers. The most used commands are receive,invoke,assign,pick,wait,throw,terminate,flow,sequence,switch,Scope,fault handlers.
4. Falut Handlers - Catch and handle faults
5. Compensation Logic - Undo logic.

A BPEL process file can directly comparable with Java class, PartnerLink is import statement, Variables is class variable, Flow Logic is methods, Fault Handler is nothing but exception handling.

The above guide can found in here.

Business Process Execute Language (BPEL)

Here comes the maturity of Service Oriented Architecture(SOA), now increasing number of companies looking in SOA and web service as an integration components of connected application. First we need to convert existing business application to web service and publish this as WSDL, now we have multiple WSDLs out there, what about orchestrate. Do we need to code all flow in client side by invoking each web service? The answer is BPEL, BPEL is connecting all web services and orchestrate business flow. In other words, BPEL is a facade to execute multiple flows behind the scenes. BPEL was adopted by major vendors like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM. There is no vendor specific lock-in implementation issues.

Since Oracle Fusion is consider as next generation middleware implementation because one stop buy for products and cost benefits, Oracle's BPEL Process Manager getting more attention, major advantage of Oracle BPEL Process Manager is, it is not stored executable files as Oracle specific, that is, it is as native format. So portable to other BPEL engines in future is not an issue. One more advantage would be, instant fail over support and cluster management.

Oracle BPEL Process Engine consists of four components
1. BPEL Designer - GUI based
2. BPEL Console - Monitoring, Performance tuning and administration
3. BPEL Server - Sync and async messaging, exception management
4. Built in Integration Services - JMS messaging support, Java embedded.


Here is a quick start guide with installation of Oracle BPEL and executing a sample code. In general, learning curve for this is very little, assuming that you have some web service experience.

Weekend Movies

1. Michael Clayton :

Great Movie. This movie revolving with 3 main characters

1. Micheal Clayton (Geroge Clooney) : A gambling addict working in a well known law firm, scratching his seat for 17 years at same position, nick named as Miracle Worker.
2. Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) : A mental breakdown top notch lawyer, try to cover up a big organization (U-North) from 3 Billion dollar lawsuit.
3. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton): A cut throat chief counsel working at U-North, her primary job is to rescue her company from the law suit.
   
   

As movie starts, I didn't understand first 2-3 scenes, after flashback started everything is clear. This story is based on 4 days happening between this 3 characters. Micheal wandering around for money to settle his unsuccessful bar business, he got an emergency call to Milwaukee to support his colleague and his long time friend Arthur's mental break down. At same time Karen found that Arthur is helping people who sued her company. After that, story becomes wild and Karen ordered to tap Arthur's phone calls, follow him and finally ordered to kill him. Micheal come into big play after Karen ordered to kill him also. Final moments of this movie is really great and twists and turns. Overall, this movie is must see for movie lovers.

2. No Country for Old men :

Excellent movie and core of this movie is, how bad this hit-mans are and the drug related crime in Texas. Javior Bardem acted as a hit-man, awesome and superb performance. No wonder why he was selected for best actor in Oscar. He just dramatize audience as well as Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin happened to found 2 million dollar suitcase from drug dealers and he wants to settle with that money. But poor guy doesn't know that it was buged. Where ever he goes, Javior followed him with sophisticated killing weapons. Finally Josh able to hide money and recovered it but murdered by Mexican gang members. But I won't agree with Javior's final murder, that is, Josh's wife. He justifying it by saying that he already given word to her husband (Josh), that too, she just came back from her mother's funeral. Tommy Lee acted as sheriff and he just can't stop any violence in this county. This movie is a flawless movie and can give 10 out 10 score.

Exchange Trading Funds (ETF)

Stock investment getting tougher day by day. One single reason would be selecting diverse portfolio. Earlier diversification means, select 5 stocks from US market, 1 from defense, 1 from blue chip, 1 from health care, 1 from technology and 1 from fastest growing stock either technology or pharmacy. If you could spent 8-10 hours per week, you can manage your portfolio efficiently. But due to economy changes and fast adoption of global economy's, diversification becomes very complex and our portfolio should expose to international market stocks and the money we are planning to put in for investment should be more than what we could afford. If we are still maintaining, old way of diverse portfolio, we are prone to loosing money. Due to this factors, last summer after US market hits new highs, lot of part time investors like me sold all US based stocks and settled with mutual funds and ESPPs, which turned out to be wise decisions. Now it is good time to start again since US market is very down but just little money is good and small diverse like 3 stocks from US market mainly large caps because large cap stocks are very cheap now. Stay away from small cap since it is very expensive now.

As I mention above, due to complexity of diverse, there is good opportunity for part time investors to pitch in ETF. Because ETFs are already well diversify. ETFs are well in middle of Stocks and traditional mutual funds. The benefits of ETF are

1. Low cost
2. Instant diversify
3. More transparency (This is one makes difference from mutual funds).
4. Tax Benefits(Because mutual funds managers are very frequently add/remove stocks and capital gains will transfer to stockholders rather ETF will not add/remove stocks frequently)

ETF can be traded as same as stocks or mutual funds. The Net asset value(NAV) would be determine after market close and if you are selling next trading day, you might loose or gain something since you are selling based on previous day NAV.

The only issue with ETF is complex creation and redemption process. But if you are familiar with mutual funds then okay. Normally if you buy a mutual fund, you are dealing with a money manager and he/she could decide to buy basket of stocks on your behalf. To make this process better, money manager could already created a basket of stocks and name it like "Large Cap Fund" as name implies, this fund dealing with large cap stocks so you can buy 25% of your investment money for "Large Cap Fund" and remaining goes for "Small Cap", and "International fund". The same here in ETF, all you can do is by typing "NY" to buy New York 100 Index Fund, which means you are buying a 100 stocks diversify fund on one click. If you are fully buying ETFs, you portfolio would looks like,

1. New York 100 Index fund (25%) - Fully US based and combination of large and mid size companies.
2. S&P Growth Fund(25%) - High growth S&P index.
3. Dow Jones Oil Funds (25%) - Group of oil explore and drilling companies.
4. S&P 50 Asia index(25%) - One fund for all Asian market companies.

Do you see modularity in here? Your portfolio now well diversify as well as you have a choice of modularity, sector wise, index wise, growth wise, geographic wise. If you thing swap oil funds with technology funds, we can easily swap it. The maintenance time to manage portfolio is almost zero.

http://www.ishares.com/home.htm - good one for ETF and well established one.

http://www.fool.com/etf/etf.htm - 60 seconds guide to ETFs.

Up in the air : A special work.

The current space mission STS 123 to International Space Station(ISS) by Space Shuttle Endeavour is special one. This mission provides first module of Japanese Experiment Module (Kibo) and Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator. Dexter is fully automated robotic arm which reduce some of the space walk activities. It would save lot of time and effect for astronauts since some actives can be done by this robotic arms rather than spacewalks. Dexter also duped as Canadaarm. The Japanese Experiment module is largest planned module for US side. This module final assembly will be completed on 2010.

Already ISS is the most expensive object ever build by mankind[Source:Wikipedia], after all these additions it would become more expensive and greater scientific achievement .

Spike of Oil Price.

Many of us, still remembers the scary Goldman Sachs Oil price predication back in March 2005, at that time oil price was $50-$55, some body even ridiculous about this predication. what a losers??. After 3 years now, Oil price spikes to $110 per barrel and no signs of price decrease for foreseeable future. US economy is now in recession, due to declining demand, oil price should come down, but it is not happening. The main reason would be, as George Bush said during previous state of union address, US people are addicted to oil and they have no choice also because of poor public transportation infrastructure. Now what is happening is people are driving to shopping mall but not buying anything because they want to save some money for gas.

With combination of credit market meltdown, oil price and decline home equity, things are looking very gloomy and positive signs are far away, may be summer of 2009 unless oil price come down and stimulus rebate checks going towards shopping not to pay off loans.

Manage situation before it controls you...

Most of the times in our life we are in good situation, but often due to law of nature, sometimes we are in bad situation. When ever a situation controls you, you might loose control of yourself. A situation in this context is blanket term. A situation can be good, bad, confrontation, anger, sad or happy. All uncontrolled situation can be bad for our health and wealth. When we start with our career at young age, lets say 21 years of old, we don't know what is even situation is. We just come and go after completing our tasks and enjoy our life. After getting married and having kids, we have to know how to manage situation cleverly and efficiently otherwise we have to carry enormous burden on our own, even sometimes our family also have to share the burden for us.

Most of us, try to play our game by the principle "don't drop ball". Don't drop ball is good and very honest way of doing our day by day job and reaching high on our career. But if we are stick with don't drop ball after having family and kids, we are vulnerable to "controlled by situation" person. If some situation happen to you, drop the ball and step back, analysis the situation, found an alternate way or delegate something and then carry the ball until you reach goal line. There is nothing wrong with that. If we are adamant to carry the ball all the time without dropping, each situation would make our life a living hell.

At the end of the day, our health, our family and our career is important to our life. We can make ton of money if we are in good health, good family support and good career. If we want to achieve all of this, drop the ball and step back and analysis when some situation demanding you to do so.

Recession then Shopping spree then Boom.

Actually when recession is around the corner, most of the bellwether technology firm's executives become an impulsive shopping buyers and their shopping spree would increase as sky high. As of now, Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo, Digg.com and they already bought Danger ( a start up mobile software company ). Microsoft may not continue to pursuit to buy more companies after Yahoo, since their shopping budget for this recession may run out with expensive Yahoo purchase. Then all other bellwether jumps into shopping such as Google, IBM and Oracle. This is good for start up companies, because most of the acquired company's top executives and top tier software engineers, would quit because of sudden culture change and unable to adjust with new management etc. They come out to start a new start up or join with already booming innovative start ups. This is really boost for these start ups, which are struggling with funding as well as attrition now. This is starting of next boom cycle.

Finally Apple opened iPhone.

Because of fierce competition from RIM Blackberry and Google's open source mobile software Android, Apple first time ever opened it's one of product for outside Apple developers to develop software for iPhone. Even without these feature, iPhone is huge success for Apple, now it is 28% smart phone market share in US (Source : WSJ). The cool about iPhone is, one device for many purpose and easily sync up with Mac calendar, contacts and iTunes. Apple software very frequent software updates now improved iPhone's endurance. Earlier it was very unstable and "freeze" a lot. 

GOP Steady and Dems still ...

Yesterday after major primaries, GOP finalized their president nominee for 2008 general election. McCain officially started his campaign yesterday. This is good for Republican party, from now on, Republican can rally behind McCain and promote him as next US President. But in other hand, Dems are still up in the air. They don't know who will win nomination and probably they have to wait until National convention. I think both Obama and Hillary are very tough fighters and capable of running this country, but now for the sake of party, one has to agree for vice president nominee. Based on one statistics, even if Obama or Hillary wins all the remaining contest, they can't fulfill mandates delegates for nomination. So Dems super delegates come into play to choose their nominee.

One more controversy is brewing from FL and MI that their voice has to be heard since Dems top leaders rejects FL and MI delegates all together because both the states conducted primaries earlier than party guidelines. I think that even court can't intervene here because the process is internal to one party and its leadership decisions.

As I learned more about these primaries and Caucasus, I believe it is true democracy and I wish all demarcate countries should follow this system. But associated cost and time with this is unbearable by most of the countries. As I know India has the similar set up but we are not utilizing it properly and everything there is finally decided by party leader with help from his/her close friends and relatives :).

We are the champions.(this time outside india)

After a long long long time, Indian cricket shines in Australia. Well deserve and much needed victory for young Indian cricket team. I have to emphasis one incident here, my opinion that is the turning point of this series. This was 4th match between India and Australia, Ishant Sharma as a rookie gave lot of runs in first 2 overs, Hayden just blasting him for fours and third over also not too good, that time, captain Dhoni had a chat with rookie, after that he just changed line and length, here you go, Sharma took 4 wickets and India won the game. After that he was a most dangerous blower for Aussies. I would recall previous incidents from Indian cricket, seamers came and went as unnoticed, if they gave some expensive overs, that's it, his career ends there. Our impatient captains and selectors sacked them and turn their concentration on finding spinners because they don't want to take risk by loosing matches, they had a very short term goals, which really hurts Indian cricket very hard for long time, we were champions in Indian soil and losers in outside India (even in Sri Lanka and future may be in Bangladesh). But this time something different. From this series, Indian cricket found much needed seamers Ishant and Praveen Kumar.

The series winning game was simply a team effort, everybody contributed their share to win this game. Especially Sachin and Praveen were good. Sachin is like lion nowadays, when he is hungry, he would use all of his strength to score runs for team. Earlier he was like tiger, score in all games and showed his strength almost all games. But lion is always better than tiger. Unfortunately I didn't watch this game, so I can't comment on Praveen's blowing in details but based on scoreboard, he was awesome. Way to go team India.

Weekend Movies.

This weekend we watched 2 movies both of them are based on New York and crime movies. American Gangster and The Brave One.

American Gangster
I can give 8/10 to this movie. Good storyline and screenplay and most scenes were filmed very naturally and costume also modified to fit into 1960s timeline. All the locations in the film were authentic and real places in and around New York city. One of my favorite hero is Denzel Washington and he was amazing in this film, he just lived as "Frank Lucas" character.He was really acted well in the scene where he burnt down $50k coat because that was the turning point of the movie, after he wore that coat to boxing match, everybody knows that he was rich and running a gangster.

Russell Crowe is another brilliant guy also acted as equivalent to Denzel. Director handled the scenes excellently by separating them the whole movie, that is, big plus for this movie. In other hand, movie was little slowed in the middle because of unnecessary family affairs to fill up time to delay the meeting of 2 characters.

Overall I skeptic about this is a real story, I think that 10-15% is real and remaining is just imagination from director Ridley Scott. It was very hard to believe that US military cargo planes used for heroin transportation.

The Brave One
I think Jodie Foster would love to act solo nowadays. The storyline should based on her role 100%. I hate monopoly even in movies. So nothing to write about this movie. I wasted 120 Mins by watching this movie.

FOW - Future Of Web Apps.

As Future Of WebApps Miami Conference wound down yesterday, there were lot of discussions about future of web apps.  One thing loud and clear is, cost of innovation come down hence there won't be any limitations for innovation, in other words innovation no longer tied to company's balance sheet or tough economy conditions. 

1. Kevin Marks - Google engineer's thought on Social Graph API which consolidate data across disparate social network sites.

2. End of emails - FOW see the death of emails. Because everybody now using social networks and it's message box for communication since email not going to provide much influence to younger generation.

  

3. Joe Smarr's take on Google's upcoming OpenSocial release and his thoughts on future of web apps.

4. Most scalable blog site wordpress Mullenweg's scaling and spamming.

5. Openness,happiness and sunny future of web apps?

Any other logic?

Yesterday a friend mine asked to help with her MS assignment, it is java so I got interested and solved it. But I was not satified with the logic which I provided, Is any other logic for this?

The aim is to print all possible 3 and 2 letter word from String "GOLD".

public class TestChars {
public static void main(String []args) {
String str = new String("abcdef");
char[] chara = str.toCharArray();
int count = 0;
int countForTwo = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
for(int j = 0 ; j < str.length(); j++){
if(i != j) {
System.out.println("" + chara[i] + chara[j]);
countForTwo++;
}
for(int k = 0; k < str.length(); k++) {
if( i != j && j != k && i != k) {
System.out.println("" + chara[i] + chara[j] + chara[k]);
count++;
}
}
}
}
System.out.println("" + count);
System.out.println("" + countForTwo);
}
}

BTW, Cricker match getting interested now, "Noxious Weed" really undesirable for Aussies.

Google's Killer Application.

Already Microsoft getting heat from Google, that Google is capturing all critical functionalities from Microsoft office suite and developed online based Google Docs suite. From many of small business to individuals now using Google docs instead of expensive Microsoft office suite. Now Google released a "sharepoint killer application" named as Sites. It was just redesign of JotSpot wiki, which Google acquired some years back.

I think that now Google can declare war against Microsoft office suite. Google has now all replacement products for Microsoft office. Actually now we are expecting a twist from Microsoft that they will release a online based mini office suite to fight against Google Apps.

What's behind Web2.0?

It seems to me everybody started loving Web 2.0 concept, who ever really enjoying Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs, diggs, tag cloud etc are not making any comments.This makes software engineers unhappy who design and develop web 2.0 applications. The improvement and innovation happen only if there is strong constructive criticism from users, since everybody just accepting Web 2.0 as is and not making any constructive criticism leads to a sudden death of web 2.0. The criticism now these web 2.0 drawing are from some fundamentalists who hates web democracy. To make things worse, major companies like Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle are not investing money towards WEB 2.0 research and development.Google is the only company investing something for R&D, but for Google web2.0 is part time business, there main revenue not tied to Web 2.0. So the growth now Web 2.0 enjoying may not be sustain for long time. Unless something got changed in coming years.

Excellent Cricket Match.

After many low scoring matches and rain delayed matches, yesterday we had an excellent and thrilling cricket match between India and Australia. First of all, Ricky Pointing from Australia and Gautham Gambhir from India played marvelous innings and made this game very interesting. India's players are tough and fought back very hard to win this game. I thought one point of time when Harbhajan and Pathan were on grease, we are going to win. But Lee is too good to take tailenders wicket, he just beat them with his pace.

I don't know what happened to Sachin Tendulkar, the ball he got out was very simple for him to play, having this many years of experience and genius cricket brain. I think he was bad form since this one day series starts, may be he become overwhelmed with continuous cricket career since he was 17. He can retire one day cricket now and concentrate on Indian domestic cricket to help Indian cricket to find more talented cricketers. Uthappa was good and our million dollar baby Dhoni was very slow to score his runs also cost us this game. But Dhoni wants to stay until the game ends, his intention was good but he just wasted lot of run scoring opportunities.

Master - Worker Pattern.

Master-worker pattern sounds like as layman terms split a work into multiple pieces and delegate each pieces to workers and gather all work results and send back to caller. If we want to implement in java, we can easily do it by multiple threads. But what about behind single node? what about availability? how we are going to address single point of failure? Master-Workers design pattern addresses all of these answers. From Martin Flower's Patterns of Enterprise Application,

"How, then, do you effectively use multiple processors? In most cases the way to go is clustering. Put all the classes into a single process, and then run multiple copies of that process on various nodes. That way, each process uses local calls to get the job done and thus does things faster. You can also use fine-grained interfaces for all the classes within the process and thus get better maintainability with a simpler programming model.”

A master is always one node and workers can be multiple nodes and Master controls job queue and creates set of tasks, put it in shared space and waits for workers to complete it.

here is good article about Master-Worker pattern http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=DistCompute

Terracotta - A flashback.

While reading Terracotta architecture, I was just paused and my mind flashback to year 2002, when we try to build an ambitious health care contract system, we want to do something to scale up our performance a 100 fold to differentiate us from our competitors.This was almost impossible to achieve it since we are talking about some 10 million worth of health care products with massive transactional system. At that time we want to build a secondary in-memory servers to cache our entire set of data, for fast retrieval and store data and asynchronously persist with database. But for some valid reason, we did not implement it and scrap the whole idea.

Ok..flashback ends here. Now we have a open source, well defined and proven, NAM (Network Attached Memory) called Terracotta. Terracotta was there in market since 2006 but it made some buzz recently after it become open source at end of 2006. The year 2007 it got much needed support from open source community and become leader in Java clustring solutions. Here is a good simple introduction to Terracotta from infoQ.

Now question is where to use Terracotta. They are multiple places where ever we need a cache support. Here are some effective usage of Terracotta.

1. Distributed Caches
As per Terracotta.org, "Distributed caches powered by Terracotta can see as much as 100x throughput vs. native solutions, with no changes to existing code." and "Terracotta can support any data structure from simple hashmap to OSCache".

2. Hibernate
"Terracotta helps to reduce database overload caused by O/R-mapped applications deployed in a clustered environment. Use it to cluster your Hibernate second level cache, or get even more performance by clustering disconnected Hibernate objects."

3. HTTP Session Clustering
"Terracotta is used by Java websites both large and small to cluster web sessions. When clustered by Terracotta, web application session becomes highly available without actually being replicated to every app server in the cluster. This leads to scalable applications especially when used in conjunction with an HTTP load balancer. "

Taste of Knight Rider again.

It is more than 20 years after today NBC telecasted one of my favorite serial Knight Rider again. Last series was telecasted in Sri Lanka TV as soon as NBC telecasted here in USA, We took advantage of being geographically close with Sri Lanka. Knight Rider starts all Wednesday at 7.30 PM IST, we get ready to watch it by 6.30PM itself. As a kid I enjoyed the series a lot.

Now again in NBC today, it is Knight Rider 2 hour movie, this time KIIT is like Windows Vista with compare to early KIIT, which was like Windows 2.0. Integration with spy camera, image matching, solar energy fuel all are advance invention for KIIT. Today KIIT using C21 cargo plane for transportation. This time also I enjoyed the show as I did it 20 years ago as kid.

My prediation worked.

As I blogged last week about high definition DVD format war, as I predicated Toshiba backed HD DVD format going to end of life. Today Toshiba announced that they are going to give up HD DVD format

I have to give myself some kudos.....Sony's gamble also paid off because they spent large sum of money to promote Blu-ray.

This is good time to buy Blu-ray player. My choice would be Sony BDP-S300 since it is moderate price and best quality among all other players.

Gone Baby Gone.

Today as usual went to Blockbusters to get some movies, my wife called me and asked me to take "Gone Baby Gone" DVD. I was reluctant since this movie was directed by Ben Affleck and almost unknown cast other than Morgon Freeman. But anyway took it and watched. Wow..it was a great movie to watch. Started as a crime movie and ends as an emotional movie. Ben Affleck, rookie[Oops I'm wrong his first movie as director is I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney] director handled this complex subject really good. Some of storyline just similar to Mytic River. Casey Affleck is simply brilliant. The final moment of the movie is really touching and powerful.

Real firecrackers.

In next few weeks, it is going to be real time firecrackers somewhere over the Pacific Ocean skyline. US government decided to shoot down spy satellite, which anyway going to fall from orbit because of power failure. This spy satellite was launched on 2006 and it failed as soon as enters orbit. So this satellite's fuel tank is almost full and may cause severe damage when it hit the ground. But there is only 1 percent chance that this satellite hits populated area. Because our earth 75% covered with sea and 24% is waste land. So some experts are concerned with US plan, and this would leave some million piceces hanging in orbit(like debris cloud), which act as a barrier to other satellite and spacecraft. Most recently China shoot down a weather satellite and made a large debris cloud in space. Now it is US's turn.

I don't think this actions would speed up global warming.

Big format war.

There is a big format war between Toshiba and Sony regarding high definition DVD. Toshiba backing up with HD DVD format and Sony backing up with Blu-ray format. The main difference is, which technology to use for interaction, Java based BD-J or Microsoft based HDi. Now HD-DVD soon going to be end of life(EOL). Couple of weeks ago, BestBuy(largest US retailer) announced that their preferred format would be Blu-ray, to make things worse for HD DVD, today Netflix (largest DVD renter) says no to HD DVD format. Lot of customers like me, has been waiting for long time to buy high definition DVD player but confused with which one to buy. I think now we have clear idea, how industry heading to in terms of high definition DVD format.

As per following graph from wiki, clearly majority of studios are in favor of Blu-ray but 2 major studios are still with HD DVD. Universal and paramount are leading movie producers and their market share is huge. So best bet would be wait for some more time before making decision.

Google Android - Is next Java for Mobile?

The main aim of Google's Android is to run on all low end mobile phones to smart phones without adding any special chipsets. Android is open source and Linux based, there are millions of developer's "hands on deck" to improve or add new features for Android. Today Google introduced first prototype of Android, guess what, this demo was running in 2 generation old ARM9 process. Google's whole idea about this Android is, design and develop an application framework on top of a "sandbox", which can be run on any mobile O/S. Now here is real twist, Google just developing an application framework for mobile, then why they need to bid for wireless spetrum, they won wireless spetrum bid by losing lot of money.

Now we have to connect the dots, you have the world's first class mobile application and control of unlimited wireless spetrum(700MHz explained here, this is after analog to digital TV conversion free'd spetrum). What you can do with that? We can transfer large set of data over phone to phone, we can transfer a viedo or pictures to any phone if we are running same Android software. So it is something like P2P support for mobile. We can download a Netflix movie in Mobile and watch it in Android movie player. It is inline with consumer-is-winner Google concept.

This is virutally end of Java ME ambition to rule mobile world. Google by-passing Java ME because it is not as fast as Google's expectation and Google is building their own JVM called Dalvik, which is going to be custom virtual machine on top of a Linux kernel.

Groovy - All set to launch.

As Java becomes a community platform or language or whatever we want to call it, Java grown a lot because it is not owned by one company. In other words Sun mature enough to open up it's underlining implementation to all developers hence we have more and more invention for Java language such as Spring, Struts, JSF etc. Having said that now these frameworks or specifications are declining showly. Now we want something easy to code with less bugs and bring up system quckily at same time high quality. Here is one dynamic script language extension for Java is Groovy. There was lot of debate among developer's community, which is to choose Groovy or JRuby in last year.Groovy got some steam after its 1.5 version release in last year. I think Groovy is clear winner specially for Java developers, because

• it is just an extension of JVM
• easily integrate with existing java objects.
• no need to deal with 2 different objects.(one for Java and one for Grovvy like JRuby).
• zero learning curve for Java developers to start Groovy.
• easily integrate with existing java web-app frameworks.

Rich Internet Applications with Flex and AIR.

This is the presentation; I’m waiting for days to understand FLEX better. Nice one.Very detailed and good education for naive FLEX developers with Java background. As he explained, RIA is all about “expressiveness”. Web site needs to be more “expressive” in order to attract and retain users.

1. Car insurance accidental information system is good, but he didn’t say what the success rate after FLEX migration.
2. As performance side FLEX outpaced AJAX by wide margin. For example to show 2000 rows Ajax is taking more than 33 secs (note after a javascript warning), but Flex is taking 20000 rows little more than 1 secs.
3. His demo application itself tempted to download FLEX SDK beta, FLEXBuilder. He showed how FLEX script acting as a object oriented way and MVC pattern and a component.
   
4. Desktop Vs Web application at deployment time decision is plus for flex application, eBay example is good one.

5. Message driven collaboration charting also great and requires small bandwidth to collaborate efficiently.

The disadvantage would be,

1. Debugging at front level may be difficult.
2. I hate drop and drag front end approach,but good that they have both code and drop and drag switch over.
3. Since all component's source code owned by Adobe, I don't know scope of adding and customizing components as we wish.

Perfection denied by Confident Silent Killers.

WOW...what a game? I thought Peyton Manning is in field last 3 mins. of 4th quarter in place of Eli. I would say Eli became Eli+Peyton in 4th Q. Most happiest person from this game is parents of Eli because their sons give them “double whammy”. Everybody must be in edge of their seat in 4th Q. The failure of Pats is they are very protective to keep ball and didn’t take any risks like they did it in 4Q. May be they thought 7-3 is enough to win this game. They didn’t know that scoring more in first 2 Q will always helps final out come. Plax exactly did what he said in couple of weeks ago. Pats underestimate him and always single covered him. Finally they paid the price.
Cool , great season and great games and next season is not far away.

Patriots to Perfection - 21 Hours away.

All are set and final count down started for Patriots towards Perfection. Today I went to Costco for shopping and fans were line up to buy big plasma/LCD TVs to Beer and Superbowl cake. It is funny that wife's are looking at husband face, and husband are starring at TV set one by one.

Cricket: India not looking good at this time. Sachin out was heart breaking and unlucky one. Lets hope rain will save India.

Playing with Life.

While reading latest news from India, one news got my attention that kidney racketeers issue, This time from North India. I was little emotional on this because last year my beloved father suffered from Chronic kidney disease, which created shock waves in my mind but I was confident that I can easily replace his kidney to solve the failure. But when I landed in India, I got another shock that in my state Tamil Nadu they stopped kidney transplantation after a massive fraud like now in North.Other states also had a same kind of restriction and I can't enroll in waiting list also, because that would take another 5 years. I didn't lost hope and because of open market(thanks to Manmohan) Baxtor healthcare in India has a easy and simple solution to treat kidney failure, which is called CAPD but little expensive but was affordable. Thanks to the Dr. Palanirajan from Madurai Apollo who explained to me about this and giving training to my mother. The whole process just took about 3 weeks. For my father he is a god. Now he is in CAPD for almost one year.

But I'm thinking about who suffered the same issue but can't afford this treatment. They have to die because of this fraud. It is bulls*** and we have to punish this criminals until death before taking their kidney to give it needy and suffering people, they have to prosecute them in separate court not in civil courts. This doctors and criminals doesn't understand chasing money makes them Paranoia, narcissism and attention deficit disorders.Since they are always greedy and chasing money,that makes them to play with lives. Nobody will do this fraud unless they are mentally ill and paranoia.

Microsoft bids $45 billion for Yahoo

Checkmate to Google. From CNN "Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for Internet search."

Here are more informations.
Fun Facts

• Yahoo and Microsoft working on this deal since late 2006, their top executives met at undersea, deep inside Amazon forest and Sahara desert to keep this top secret.
• If the deal goes thru, Microsoft said that they will keep Yahoo as a separate entity and will not interfere it's operation. But based on Microsoft's history and creditability they might sunset Yahoo products just to promote their own MSN after 2-3 years. So stop using Yahoo Mail, Flicker and other Yahoo service from today.
• Microsoft also said that they would announce a bid soon, after Google stock hit bottom like Yahoo, and they are saving money for that by adding more bugs in Windows Vista OS.

Real Facts

• The timing of this announcement is really boosting for some pessimistic who suffering from recession blue in wall street. (from Marketwatch)
  
• This M&A fuels other companies to buy their competitors because Microsoft can foresee market ahead of time compare with their peers. (from CNNMoney)
  
• If you love graphs here is detailed analysis of MSFT,YHOO and GOOG and clearly MSFT+YHOO is next EXXON+MOBILE.
  
• Antitrust is always an issue for this kind of deals, but Microsoft lawyers knows that how to resolve it because they have lot of experience with it.
  

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. 

Needs Vs Wants

The things we have to have are “needs” such as food, cloths, winter coats, a warm cozy home, transportation etc. Basically we can’t live without “some things” are “needy things”. In other side “Wants” are we can live without it such as video games, designer jeans, branded value cars etc.

Other things to consider when trying to figure out a need vs. a want:

Will this item help me get ready faster? Maybe a new electric shaving machine that works better will help you to office on time, and electric toothbrush also.

I need a new sweater for winter, but is it necessary for me to have the designer version that costs $50.00 more than another brand -– even though both will keep me warm? what about quality? if I buy a sweater for $25 which is not that quality as $33, then I need $33 one.

I need a car to get to office, but do I need a 500 HP speeds and DVD player with navigation? in other hand I need a car for my big family with DVD for my kids and navigation for better driving and some power also required.

So based on each one’s context “Want” can become “Need”. It is depends on each one’s money goals and able to spend on “Needs”

Patriots : Festival of Football.

Tomorrow it is going to be fireworks and history going to write again, after Patriots beats Giants at New York. Yes, It is almost "walking in park" for unbeaten Patriots to beat Giants team. So I'm looking forward to celebrate victory rather than watching game. This game is too hyped so we are going to watch this match in 3 channels. Tomorrow whatever channel we change during peak time going to see Tom Brady and Randy Moss faces in screen. Tom need 2 more touchdown to set record and Moss needs one more catch to set another record. We are going to see 3 records tomorrow. I believe this is first time in any team sports to break this many records. Way to go Patriots!!!

Cool website for finding cool tools and web sites.

Good site for finding new web sites and emerging tools.
http://www.makeuseof.com

Memorable Photos.

I bought my first digital camera in 2004, Canon's brand new model Power Shot Pro 8.0 MP. Still I'm thinking none of the latest model beats it's quality.

Here are some memorable snaps, I clicked thru my high tech camera.

Villa Olivia Ski Resort

Had lot of fun today in Villa Olivia Ski Resort,Bartlett. Very good place for kids and who want to learn ski. There snow tubing is great and my 3 and half enjoyed a lot.

Great Professionalism by ABC 7 Chicago Newscast

As always today @ 10.00PM, I switched on ABC 7 news to find local happening, Weather, and Sports updates. I’m watching this news since I moved to Chicago. Ravi is news anchor today. He is just started talking with onsite reporter about today’s wind damage, we heard a big bang sound and Ravi was shocked and screamed. We had no clue what went wrong. After that, we updated by Ravi that a mini van banged into ABC 7 studio glass doors, just 15 feet away from Ravi. But he was bounced back very quickly and started usual news cast. As per first reports, the driver of mini van intentionally did this act. If that is true, this is most in-sense act by a possible drunken driver. Please don’t drink and drive. Don’t spoil other’s holiday celebrations.

American Foot Ball a training of Life

When I had arrived USA as first generations emigrate from India in the year 2000, I have no idea what American football was. I had seen this sports this in ESPN Indian channel couple of times and thought it is an intense, bloody game like euro rugby. But after started working in Silicon Valley, I was amazed by watching people talking about these sports in office every Monday morning and foot ball flying above my head in cubicle. I noticed that some of my team mates were upbeat from Sep first week to Feb 1st week until super bowl. This all compel me to watch this sports and my first complete football match was 2002 super bowl between Patriots Vs Rams. After Patriots won the match, I decided to watch all Patriots match and my favorite hero from that match is Adam Vinatieri because of his last minute kicking goal. Since then I continue watching football, and I learned following lessons from it which is very helpful for real life.

1. You should take risks on early part of your life. Most of the play selection in 1st and 2nd Quarters is pass play (risk selection prone to interceptions). If you score more in first half you would be better off in second half.
2. Especially last half of your life doesn’t take risks. Most of the play selection in 3rd and 4th Quarters is running play very safe and good game to pass time.
3. Always look for backup plan (Plan B) for every situations/decisions. This is very true after seeing each team’s depth chart.
4. Thrust others and give them plenty of chance to overcome there obstacles. QB throwing ball to wide receivers, even though they drop ball first couple of times. After they established correct chemistry, QB can throw ball in air, believing that his thrust worthy wide receiver will catch it at any cost.

More to come……