Software Development - A new series 1

A long ago, a friend of mine argued with me that Software development is like painting and developers are painters. As per his view, software development should be done by artists. I straight away disagreed and his argument was immature and naive. Painting and artist are gifted one, not everybody gets those and Software development is a professional job, so it doesn't always required some gifted person to develop it.

Lets take a example of construction field, it is heavy physical intensive work, it required some 250 lbs and 6 feet to perform the job but that is ideal. If a construction company wants to hire only 6 feet and 250 lbs, they can't hire enough employers to build a house and can't make profit. They want to hire any body physically fit for work and then divide work that heavy object lifting job goes to 250 lbs and some arranging, nailing job goes to other below 250 lbs. This is the system, this is how our society work, no body feels discrimination if 150 lbs not getting 50 lbs lifting job.

The same with software development, for a minimum level of coding one should have fundamental strong on the programming language, some working knowledge of database, a decent level of knowledge of Linux/Unix. The distinguish comes as form of expert level, which can be achieved with in 6-8 years of experience. There are 10 million software developers are here in U.S, all of them are not gifted and they are fit into this expert, medium and starter category. But other than that in Software there is one main aspect is attitude, the attitude is really important for developers. In fact attitude is important for any professional work, but i feel very strong about attitude and software development. Development required brain work and run through some analysis/processes in mind all the time hence good attitude required to develop quality software and within budget. More over attitude is really important for young industry like software development.

Why it is important? Again lets take construction field, construction is very old industry and all are well defined and well formed. Lets assume there are 100 people building a house, they may not even know their names each other, but the coordination and building process goes smoothly. All they want to know is what is their job today and when they have to finish it. But the young industry Software development, there was nothing defined, each day there are new development methodology, processes, each company has it's own processes and so on, nothing was integrated and everything working as it's own area. At end of the day, based on my 12 years of progressive development experience, each software developers attitude is making difference of successful completion of project particularly in IT industry.

Based on my experience, there are some main factors contributing good and bad attitudes, they are A. Context Switching B. Stress Management C. Ask other's help/ego.

Context Switching :
What i mean context switching, there are two types of context switching, first as soon as we start to work, we have to forget our personal and concentrate on professional one. second, with in work switch context between projects without losing temper. The first switch is something important and everybody should follow it, a successful career rely on how one separating personal issues with professional life.

[Contd]

Fallen Hero but after May, 21st 1991 Zero

Today is an emotional day in all over Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and many Tamil families all over the world. 30 Years of indefinitely fighting against majority Sinhala, finally comes to an end with nothing. There are 100,000 people killed during this civil war, mainly Tamil ethnic. Finally Vellupillai Prabhakaran the leader of Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) got killed with his shatter separate country dream.

During the beginning years, LTTE was considered as Civil Right Movement for minority Tamil people. Prabhakaran was considered as the leader for Tamils, but later on the organization was transform itself as a “Cult” like a movement. They want to kill anybody who are not supporting separate country demand and who are not willing to join LTTE organization. The relationship with mainland Tamil Nadu was fractured when LTTE killed India’s one last of hope for reforms Rajiv Gandhi for some lame reasons. LTTE killed Rajiv so do India’s ambitious dream of reforms, because of Rajiv’s murder, India’s reforms were delayed by at least a decade.

I hope now the onus on majority Sinhala government to protect minority Tamil people and slowly integrates them with main stream. It may take decades to achieve it but you just eliminated terrorists which was impossible for India still now even U.S.A couldn’t achieve the success yet. Nothing is impossible.

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8055015.stm

Indian Election 2009 - Results

After i would say 2 decades, this is the clear sweep by a single coalition and Congress led Untied Progress Alliance (UPA) going to form government with no support from anti-globalization parties mainly Indian communists. This election was main and crucial to Indian economy, because we need a continuous, stable, globalization/progressive minded government to solidify the modern economical foundation. Now Indian people spoke the same language from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to give a clear and solid mandate to current ruling coalition UPA to continue their job mainly to improve infrastructure, abolish poverty for next 5 years.

The exit polls suggested that UPA or NDA wouldn't get simple majority and they need support from leftist parties, who are very narrow minded and anti-globalization. But real results went other way. We need a clear exit poll strategy, it is failing consistently for all over the world's election outcome. All over India vote counting started and results were announced with in 3-4 hours because now Indian election commission using electronic voting machine, early days the outcome of election took days.

Here are some highlights from India's Election 2009

1. Youth vote was the clear differentiator for this election, they want a stable government hence they choose UPA. It is clear indication that India's political power shifting from aged generation to younger generation.

2. No one can change democracy election outcome, even though here and there people voting based on caste, community and for money, the final outcome will be same from all over country.

3. 60%-65% people cast their vote for this election, which is not bad as per current democracy standard but everybody should vote and mainly urban people ditch their voting rights for various reason including lost hope with political parties and politicians. Political parties have to note this and work hard to win the trust again.

4. Glamorization and movie star connection to politics is old style. Nowadays one can't win people based on star value and attraction. For example, this time a mega movie star from state of Andhra Pradesh failed badly.

5. Political parties have to change their stance on several issues, if they are out of sync with people's day-by-day issues, future issues they will be kicked out. For example, a leading politician fighting hard for Sri Lanka's issue lost this election because he/his party didn't solve any issues for their constituencies. They forgot that Sri Lanka is out of India's map and the issue will be resolved by Indian central government, UN and other major country leaders.

Twitter Java API

In my opinion, after Apple's iPhone, iPod and Amazon's Kindle, Twitter is greatest innovation of this decade. The simple but powerful innovation allows us to share our thoughts, news, and opinion to 100K plus or even 1 million users within a single click. Amazing doesn't it? How will you share your opinion transparently within 140 chars? The twitter users also has amazing power, people sharing from all over globe by using a single entity is something powerful medium.

I was drawn into Twitter world like a year ago, so far my experience with Twitter is excellent. But every things has it is own drawback, in twitter world there are some a-holes try to deceive us by following us and make us to follow them and then silently unfollow us. I want to develop a small piece of code to find this mischief. But i found an excellent site www.refollow.com to do the same thing efficiently, i recommend all to use the refollow.com to find this rogues. But anyways i did this code to understand various APIs for Twitter. One of the great and fastest Java API for Twitter is from Google but there is no good documentation. Here is step by step guide to integrate with Google java-twitter.

1. Go to http://code.google.com/p/java-twitter/

2. Download Java-Twitter-*-SNAPSHOT.jar. Java-Twitter-*-SNAPSHOT.jar depends on following JARS

commons-beanutils-1.6

commons-codec-1.2

commons-collections-3.1

commons-httpclient

commons-lang-2.4

commons-logging-1.1.1

ezmorph-1.0.6

google-collect-1.0-rc1

httpcore-4.0

httpcore-nio-4.0

joda-time-1.6

json-lib-2.2.3-jdk15

3. Here is the complicated Google's Protocol Buffers. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats. Our job is to download bunch of C++ code and convert it to Java and jar it.

4. Download protobuf*.zip and protobuf*win32.zip.

5. Unzip protobuf*.zip and proto*win32.zip, and find a proto.exe from protobuf*win32.zip.

6. Copy the file to protobuf/src/ folder.

7. Go to protobuf/java and find README.txt for step by step guide to create protobuf-java-2.0.3.jar file.

8. After adding all the above JAR files, the code development is easy and refer http://java-twitter.googlecode.com/svn/site/apidocs/index.html

9. Make sure to install Java 1.6 and set JAVA_HOME variable correctly.

Here is code to find friendship exists call.

When positive thoughts replaced with….

Time to time I deeply dive into this “positive thoughts” and what make them disappear for some for some point of time or prolong period of time. I mean, when we watch great leader’s talks, most of time they speak on high positive note but for some time they speak on otherwise. Actually we should not always be positive on all the time, sometimes we need to think about other angle. Overly positive thoughts leads to self-illusion and overly faith based leads to always negative. So what is balanced approach?

Actually when we born, we are all positive thinkers, kids always want to explore new things and they never say I don’t want to go to some place or I don’t want to do some things. But after some time they express some kind of fear, 98% kids learn how to ride bicycle but 2% of afraid of learning the same. When age grows the positive Vs negative ratio heightened. The point is sometime environmental causing this flip side. What is it? And how not to fell into the trap? How to be positive?

When I was in California, we (I and 3 other friends) had a road trip to Las Vegas. As usual, everybody talked about money and gambling. One question was asked, how much money you need in order to fulfill your dream? Person A said 100 Million, Person B 50 Million, and Person C $300 for now (because that’s the budget for Las Vegas trip). I thought A and B are high positive thought guys, because they can think a high number and want to win that much money. After spent time there, when returning person C was very positive mood and A, B are negative mood because A and B couldn’t win 100 and 50 million or lost some money, C was made $200 and he was happy. So setting a small, realistic goals/targets always keep us positive and unrealistic goals leads to negative. I think so, it is something to do with our day by day expectation management.

I think we want to be always positive thinkers, even though it has some drawbacks. Be always positive actually yields better results. As a common average human, we all need positive thoughts, to achieve some greater results in our day by day life. It goes like this, a mistake/error committed by positive thinkers will be corrected within desirable time limit, but a mistake/error committed by negative thinkers required positive thinkers to correct it. So think always positive after all safeguards are considered and placed.

Happy Earth Day 2009

Let’s mark this day as important day in our calendar and learn how to contribute something to stop polluting earth. The issue is, we can’t continue doing what we are doing now, we shouldn’t be greedy to take all earth’s resources and leave some waste and unlivable condition to our future generation. Even simple things can make big difference and don’t be intimated by i'm not not doing more to save the earth or obsessed with go green. The world we are living is beautiful one and saving money/wealth only not enough for our kids and grandchildren, we have to give them a better living condition.

When ever I thought of going green, I always thinks to hit 100% like sell my car to buy an electric one or convert my home appliance into energy star compatible, but practicality wise those are unattainable. But slowly and steady we can achieve more things to become eco friendly. There are so many “low hanging fruits” to stop polluting our earth,

1. Don’t print papers unless necessary. Use black and white printing more than color one.

2. Recycle more, trash it in appropriate bin is easy and no brainier.

3. Quit smoking or cut down smoking, smoking is injurious to health as well as not eco friendly. As an ex-chain-smoker, quitting this habit is hard but we can, millions of million people did it then why can’t we.

4. Use online bill pay more, which save papers, checks, and stamps.

5. Use public transportation more, again some parts of country, we don’t have public transportation hence it is unattainable for now, but use bicycle for short distance, car pool and even walk if weather allows.

6. Opening and closing garage door less, don't close windows or doorways completely because use as much as natural lights. (Thanks to wife for this tip)
   
7. Buy energy star appliance when ever we buy new appliances. Buy LCD TV instead of Plasma. Use cloths to wash hands instead of paper towels. (Thanks to wife for this tip)

There are some still arguing that, we and our future generations are okay and these go green is waste and earth is clean as before like 100 years ago. There are several scientific research showed that we are polluting earth faster than before, ice melting faster than before in north/south poles, skin cancer increasing, childhood asthma increasing, these all are proved and we have evidence and statistics. A question was asked to Al Gore who is a champion of environment friendly concept, that why his home is not environmental friendly yet? And why he is still traveling in plane which is main source of damaging ozone layer? As I said before, there is something we have to live with it, even though those are not eco friendly. Because we are not advancing fast enough to invent new eco friendly items. One main reason is, we within our self still not clear, whether we are polluting this earth or not? But as per my opinion, yes we are polluting this earth and the awareness is very low to slow down it and our kids, grandchildren going to live in a glass door world, not like us in a natural world.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_gore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_day

Blink’ers

It was the boom IT time in Silicon Valley most of IT companies required to fill up both Software Engineering position to top level executive jobs. For top level executive position they went to East, Midwest, and South U.S.A based blue chip companies. Once the top executives settled with new, young Silicon Valley companies, they hired their subordinates from the same place where they came from, because understandably they want to work with trusted and friendly, cohesive team, rather than with unknown geeky Silicon Valley brought ups. It is very common all the places, for example, President Obama hired most of his friends and well known to him for his top level jobs. But the problem with Silicon Valley was, they spent millions of million dollars for those executive’s relocation charges, as .com burst these issues came up and most of them fired.

The point is, as an experienced executive leaders why they couldn’t trust and friendly with some unknowns and builds a cohesive team quickly. The trusting people is not an easy task, we want to confirm everything and double checked. But as per my opinion, we can trust and form a cohesive team within short amount of time, rather than always work with same team. Based on my experience, people who trust others with in a “blink of time” is most successful than others who took so much time to trusting others, that is, intuition.

How this successful Blinker’s trust works? Malcom Galdwell wrote the book “Blink”, he mostly covered intuition but not how it works and what are the main factors which lead to conclusion in social context? For onlookers, this highly blinkers seems to be a “push over” or “easy goers”, but each decision this blinkers made required enormous amount of analytics and cognition skills.

The fundamental of these blinker’s success is no prejudice, no jump into conclusion, flexible stereotype fixation and most importantly not seeing things black and white, good or bad. Each one is different and they are champion of one thing but not good at some other thing, that doesn’t mean that they are bad people and not trustworthy.

Crucifiction and Resurrection

Happy Easter. The crucifiction and resurrection should not consider in religious context. It is an excellent motivational tool to coming up again. The motivational speakers all over the world from all religion used Good Friday and Easter to motivate people. As a Roman Catholic dominate neighborhood grown up, I have more information and exactly know how Christians all over the world celebrates. Based on my experience with my Christian friends, they start the fasting and they feel very down at the time of Good Friday and coming back with a smile face on Easter. I don’t know I’m the only one noticing it or my neighborhood is very conservative Christians.

The story of Jesus Christ’s crucifiction is the most important event in Christian tradition, even though Jesus is God and big, he is vulnerable to many things. The message of crucifiction is, even though we are high and mighty, we have to go through the pain and suffer of common people, we shouldn’t show our power in front of some weak people. The equality and humble are the main points from crucifiction of Jesus.

The Resurrection is excellent one for motivational point of view, the message is very simple, even though died, god is a god, god can use the power any time and come back again. It is not only god, any body can come back after they buried below. Rather than wasting time on Resurrection is a myth and never happened, just think of message given from our ancestors. The phoenix bird rose from ash, even though that was a myth, we used it to motivate people, the Crucifiction and Resurrection also can be used to motivate believers.

Indian Election 2009

Again it is time for massive Indian election. We love elections because this is the time when money comes out from politicians. Poor and poorest people get good food and some money and some new cloths at this election time. Indian election is a largest democracy process in this world. There are 700 million eligible voters with 800K polling stations. Consistently 60% of people cast their ballets to select a majority party to form next government.From 1950 to 1990, Congress was the monopoly to rule India but now we have 150 plus major and regional parties to contesting in election and a team of political parties form the government. One of advantage is, we have a representation of all regional and state in Indian central government but a major drawback is building consensus among diversified political parties is huge and time consuming process.

During this election, i found that Indian politicians are at trouble because of inflammatory talks. Election Commission and local authorities are too harsh to punish this behavior. Actually i know some of my Indian friends, they feel offended if i offer a beer when they visited my home, so the point is, we are very sensitive on many matters hence if we start harassing people for sensitive talks at political meeting, we will not reach the destiny. The duty of Election Commission is to contact the election NOT imposing rules.

Actually political meeting at India is big deal, because politicians should change the context quickly. In the state of Kerala one should not speak about capitalism because most of them are communists, in state of Tamil Nadu one should not speak about Hinduism because most of them are non-believers, in state of Bihar one should speak about AK-47 because most of them are gun lovers. But some naïve politicians may not have the experience of, what to talk and how to polish the talk, which creates some issues, but election commission and media should not take that serious, may be a hefty fine, open apology and strict warning is enough for first time. The meeting is the connecting point between politicians and their followers hence too many restrictions creates some negatives at long run, let them talk freely. The restriction creates fear, fear creates controlled behavior, and controlled behavior hides original personality, hence we might end up selecting a wrong person to represent us.

Resources:

1. Excellent source for Indian Election 2009 from Google :

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/

2. Another excellent one from Yahoo :

http://in.elections.yahoo.com/

3. BBC Indian Election home page :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/south_asia/2009/india_election/default.stm

4. Indian Election Commission home page :

http://eci.nic.in/

5. Extensive India election coverage :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

Gun Control

Last summer, I just touched about Gun Control because of Chicago’s heighten violence, since then I did some research on Gun Control. One of the strong points against gun control is U.S constitution amendment 2, which says “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Last year Supreme Court’s decision to struck down the famous D.C gun ban as unconstitutional. The Supreme court’s decision virtually shut down all gun control activists voice, because there is no way to fight for gun control in Federal level. But there is some other ways to continue the fight against guns.

Actually court should not intervene private establishment’s rules and regulations. For example, as per amendment 1, all U.S citizens enjoy free speech, but not really, can we speak anything in work place? We can’t speak everything at all places, in other words we use common sense. But for amendment 2 we are not using same common sense. A ranch owner in Texas might need gun for protection, but why a New Yorker living in Manhattan pent house need a gun, he/she was already protected by private and police security force. So we should encourage private establishments to make strict rules against gun owners like they have to submit a psychological evaluation certification once a year.

After further reading and analysis, the gun ownership should be case by case basis. There are some rural area citizens of U.S may required guns for self protection against human as well as animals. They are not yet protected completely. As per records, the rural area homicide is very low and they are really utilizing gun for self protection. But urban area it is misused widely and it is going out of control sometimes. The law applicable to all citizen of country whether they live in urban or rural or occupied territory. It is in hands of private organization to control guns within their territory for better living condition for all.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
http://www.nraila.org/
http://www.guncite.com/

We Vs Ancestors

First i titled “Are we dumber than our ancestors?” but i myself got offended by that, hence here is new title like Monsters Vs Aliens.

The way we advancing our innovation and technology are slowed down comparatively our grand father days. But definitely we are advancing a lot in equality and humanity front, which was lacked a lot in olden days. The innovation is slowed down because we are too fear to take risks, afraid of failures, lot of scrutiny, lack of competition, settle with less and too much concern about privacy, human right violation, animal cruelty etc.

The 20^th century is golden era of innovation and technology advancement mainly because of Great Britain’s eager to expand their kingdom, German’s aggressiveness and finally cold war between U.S.A and U.S.S.R. At the end of cold war, we did rest our innovative mind and concentrated on peace and poverty abolishment.

But we should not settle with a fake peace and show-off poverty abolishment stance. We need a true peace and real way of world leaders to come together to try to abolish poverty and increase humanity etc. Research and innovation and technology is only one of unify our world and uplift humanity to next level, but we are lacking on that is main reason of concern. Last 20 years, major advancement we did was Computers, Information Technology, that’s it, we haven’t did anything other than Information Technology. All major expansion happened based on converting all process and machinery to information technology awareness products. Medical, Medicine, Space, Mechanical, Civil, Architecture, Agriculture and Physics, Healthcare we were not advanced but compromised with converting some of them into information technology. The same cancer finding scanner is used with high resolution but cure for cancer is not yet invented.

We are relying more on Western Europe, U.S.A and Japan to spend their resource and money for research and innovation and all others are just settled with service oriented industry. So research and innovation was monopolized and brain drained in those countries because people in advanced country try to settle with already existed technology, they may not want to advance now. For example, a 25 years old Japan youngster may spend lot of time to drive sports car rather than spending time with researching new battery turbo car engine. The point is, we all should be concentrate on research and innovation and make this world a better place to live.

End of Recession?

As per my view, recession ends when oil price jumped to $45, we are not seeing price cooling off and second indication is gold price spiked above $900 and third indication is consistent home price/sales upward trend and forth indication is stock market keep on climbing north plus today’s important last hour bull ride. We are exactly at bottom and market positioned itself to stabilize and ready for right side of U within next couple of months. Now major worry is inflation and oil price, one of prediction is oil price would touch to $300 with in a year, that’s roughly $8.00 per gallon. This prediction should not happen but never know.

It was a excellent job of President Obama and his team, President Obama said at yesterday’s 60 mins that “Now--there's a potential silver-- silver lining, which may be that things are so accelerated now, the modern economy is so intertwined and-- and wired, that things happen really fast-- for ill, but things may recover faster than they have in the past.” that is exactly right, now we need more help to par with growth of economy.

But there are some caveats though, the final version is work in progress and people try to make it perfect and perfect as a result imperfect one would emerge. The best part of the plan is, private investors and banks going to decide the price and government will not interfere with the process hence we can expect a transparent price determination of toxic assets. For example, $100 worth of mortgage can be sell to $85 or $86, there is no one price for all bad assets. The remaining matters are too economical for me to comprehend but some banks that are already write down their assets are best place to capitalize the moment as per top economists.

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/22/obama-60-minutes-intervie_n_177854.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776536222709061.html?mod=mktw
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123784599683118241.html

Death of Sun JVM?

As a Java developers, we don't care about Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) happening in market place, but today's IBM's acquisition talk of Sun Microsystems was really important. There are lot of questions about future of Java? it's open source status?? JCP process??? etc...etc...But as per my opinion, IBM did more than Sun did for Java, in fact IBM's developer's works has more document than Sun. IBM will not kill Java technology but questions regarding open source and JCP are unknowns for now. My opinion is, JCP should be continued and it was very transparent to all.

The main question is, what will happen to SUN JVM? Since IBM has it's own JVM, what is the point of continuing with SUN JVM. The issue with JVM is, the working application will not work if we change JVMs. For example, the working application from JBoss will not work in WebSphere, because the former is Sun JVM implementation and later is IBM JVM implementation. The main issues are the way different JVM handles classpath loading, constructor and object creation, garbage collection. Here is one closed bug from latest JBoss release's issue in IBM JDK. This kind of issues are very common when we change JVMs to different vendors. Most of the issues happen from outside of application boundary hence debugging and fixing is cumbersome. Here is excellent blog from Excelsior about different JVM's bahaviours .

Having said that, lets hope IBM will not change any thing for now, they can slowly mend it to their way of developing Java and it is future release. One way it is good that Java going to be with a strong company. Since last recession Sun didn't turn around their business positive so far, they are lossing money quater by quater and nothing seems to work fine for Sun. IBM is really great but one catch is they are very much into all level of IT business and it will be really interesting how they are going to handle a language which is used by millions of millions developers, mainly for open source projects. It is really a fundamental shift for IT market.

Bigger Expectations

All eyes are towards Wall Street, how it is going to trade tomorrow and coming days are crucial for these gloomy economic times. Today’s Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s optimistic interview he was very positive than before, he reaffirmed the recession could end in 2009, which is good news and all investors are closely watching this development. Actually now part of new tactics from Obama administration is, top officials are coming out and spreading positive news around media, which is good and they have to do it.

One more good news is, from OPEC that they are going to keep the output. The stability of oil price is really important during the pre-recovery period. Everybody thought OPEC going to cut production, but they exercised common sense at these tough times.

There are two key events changes the fundamentals of recession, A) stability of retail sales B) blame game and pointing finger started. Why these are really important, retail sales is really important because people start spending means they are now came out of recession mood and more importantly Obama’s big stimulus package start doing it’s magic now. The blame game towards CNBC and Jim Cramer is really good sign also. During last stage of earlier 2001-2003 recession, final moments, there were huge blame games started swirled around and lot of lawsuit filed at end of it. Now we just started it and will go on until this fall with wave of lawsuits.

Ok…again it is wait and see.

Bull Ride

Definitely bulls are out there but hid to come out because of continuous sober news from recession hit market place. Yesterday’s a simple memo from top bank official made the bulls out of hidden places. The bull market extended to world markets and today also. So the million dollar question is, are we out of woods? In my opinion, no we are not yet. Still some companies want to cut cost during Q2 and Q3 of 2009 and housing market is not finding enough buyers to stabilize market and foreclosure not yet completely done.

The top level, first line of investment professionals are out of woods for now, this is exactly happen when we are at bottom or close to bottom. First indication was, oil price didn’t touch psychological barrier of below $30 and bullish FOREX dollar value and gold price/U.S Treasury bond value up. These all are indication of bullish mood slowly returning to market. U.S employer’s cut almost 4.4 million jobs, if we use 20 jobs save 1 million calculations, U.S companies going to save $220 billions in coming quarter plus the various cost cutting could save other $200 billions. So future earning per share going to improve a lot, stocks will look like lot of cheaper and it will be viable option than Oil, Gold, and Treasury bond investment. We are all set for prolong bullish market from Q3 2009 and overall economy from Q1 2010.

But as Warren Buffet said don’t believe technical nowadays, it is very hard to plot future graph and predict this market. Jon Stewart taking direct hit with Jim Cramer about his predictions. But if we believe the same business contraction and expansion cycle pattern repeated 18 times since 1872 including 2 great world wars and great depression, what is difference at this time?

Source:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123676922949993593.html

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29592831

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/10/jon-stewart-slams-jim-cra_n_173738.html

U2 – No Line on the Horizon

It took me two days to completely understand the essence of U2’s new album “No Line on the Horizon”. This is the U2’s ultimate album of their entire career. This album is higher than their most successful album “Achtung Baby”. The specialty of this album is a kind of mesmerism, excellent background music, high stretch Bono’s vocal and heartbreaking lyrics. Some songs (moment of Surrender, fez of born) are literally taking us to space, mood elevating. The anti-poverty band U2 and Bono’s central theme is no line on the horizon then why need line between countries. He is switching between east to west song sequence is brilliant to reveal his stance on peace, anti-war and anti-poverty.

No line on the horizon

First song of album, high stretch Bono’s vocal is a difference here. The started Eno’s magic with sound was made this song as a title song. Rock style is something different.

Magnificent

A typical U2 song. Probably hardcore U2 fans going to like this song much.

Moment of Surrender 

What a mesmerizing song. It started with again rock style with church music. Lyrics and Bono’s vocal melody and background music is blended brilliantly for this song. My favorite song. The theme is “nothing can be taken granted", "big but yet vulnerable”.

Unknown Caller

Great typical U2 song.  

          

I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight

Ambient music, Bono's vocal is high here. Great song to listen.

Get on Your Boots

Grammy's introduce song. A beautiful song.       

Stand Up Comedy 

A high spirited song. "Out from under your beds C’mon ye people  stand up for your love". Great music also.       

Fez – Being Born

Excellent song, another mesmerizing song. The starting music sequence mixed with some marketplace sound somewhere in Africa and music change over to eastern style, then a pause, finally         a high note different mixed feeling music, then Bono’s vocal melody. What else we need to mesmerize us.

White as snow

A slow melody. seems to me a flashback song.

Breath

Another brilliant from Bono, it is something like pop-hip-hop mixed variety. Anti-war centric theme again.

Cedar of Lebanon

A slow melody, "Child drinking dirty water from the river bank. Soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank" lyrics describes Bono's anti-war stance.

Overall U2’s No Line on the Horizon is a quality and beautiful album ever produced by any band.

DOW : Below 7000

Good way to start March madness. Now it is time to buy and read “Even Buffet isn’t perfect”, he is one of the reasons to sink DOW below 7000 mark. AIG is other reason for today’s melt down, they lost 60 billion dollars during Q4 2008, which means they lost each day 652 million dollars (I did count on thanksgiving/xmas holidays and 92 day per Q4 calculation). This is really hurts, now AIG is 77% government organization, U.S tax payers has significant amount of stake on AIG. Actually Credit Default Swap is unregulated $60-40 trillion industry hence losses from AIG are not surprising and more to come. The U.S government should concentrate on AIG and Citigroup for now, they are the one required special attention.

DOW now trades below 7000 which is 1997 level and S&P trades at 1996 level. The positive point of view is, we have once in a life time opportunity to buy stocks at 11 years backdated price. Imagine that we are in a time machine and that takes us to 1997 to buy as much as possible backdated priced stock. But the question is, can we wait more? So the time machine takes us to back to 1992 or 1988 or even 1982. It is very hard to predict and it perhaps stops here. Any way, this is lucrative market for long timers, especially technology stocks are really trading at low level, they are taking hit just because of they are in U.S stock exchange.

The consensus is, DOW could go down to 6400 because of series of divided cut from blue chip companies. Actually we shouldn’t obsess with day by day market fluctuation. Stock markets are leading indicator of economy health for foreseeable future. Now market trades with Q3-Q4 of 2009 expectation, hence it is clear that recovery is not at sight during 2009. But as soon as, spring started/after tax period, we can see some bull market, get ready for firecrackers folks.

As a side note, tomorrow is U2’s new album “No Line on the Horizon” release, enjoy the songs.

Worst Case Scenario: U.S/World Economy never rebounds

Now we are all talking about when would U.S and world economy turns around, some predictions are end of 2009, some 2010 and so on. What would happen economy never rebounds? In other words what will happen if we are heading to prolong global wide recession for next 10 years. Here are some thoughts

1. Protectionism

Obviously protectionism supporter’s voice grows stronger than ever. World Trade Organization may not have control over world’s trade. All nations lean towards protectionism and they choose their own way of doing business with greater consideration of local job creations and localized political gains.

2. Poverty

Poverty rate grows at exponential rate in Africa and some parts of Asia, which leads civil wars and change of world map. The charity work will virtually stop.

3. Cultural Changes

This prolong recession will help some cultural changes in some countries. To run family with normal means, all of the family members have to work. Man always wins bread concept will eliminate from most of the culture.

4. Revolution

We haven’t seen a rule changing and fundamental constitution change revolutions around the world for last 60-50 years. Now we could see some revolution from some countries.

5. Stock indices

Around the world stock indices trade with low index values, but some time it spikes and then come down to low index. Stock investment may not be a good option for investors, they continue to invest in gold, silver and other metals.

6. Aged Population

Developed nations will face it is growing unemployed aging population. Senior citizen care will be a great deal of concern. The ratio between senior citizen and others will decrease. Due to protectionism, immigration will not offset the ratio either.

These are all worst case scenarios, this will not even happen because U.S and world economy are resilient and come back sooner than later.

Technical never wrong but not always…

DOW surprised most of technical indicators, because of double dipping within 3 months span. The last November’s low (~7500 and S & P ~750) was considered as low of this bear market but now again DOW down for second time. Historical perspective now this recession/depression is compared with 1873 great-great depression. But history for just reference point we can’t take it as is. As everybody knows we are going through an unprecedented tough time of our life time.

Investor’s usually ignore main street’s money spending, stimulus plans, mortgage relief’s, they are very curious about how this government going to fix credit market. So far no body from new Mr. Obama’s administration detailed out some robust plan to fix credit markets other than some stress test.  May be they are still brainstorming how to’s and other matters. But investor’s point of view they want to hear a solid plan from new administration. One message from lawmakers is, if stress test failed on a bank, then the bank would be a candidate of nationalization, which creates panic among major bank’s stock holders.

DOW’s 7300-7500 is the low for this bear market. Why we are very confident about it? Still investors has money and money waiting in sidelines to come into wall street, the high run of Gold price is great example of investor’s confidence about investing. But obviously they are looking for a super duper safe investing. The saving rate increase, gold price increase are the signs of early recovery period as per top economists. But now DOW index is down further to 7365 and may go down up to 7200. But the point to remember is Bank of America, Citibank and JPMC are the component of DOW and they are now new eye of this hurricane. So we don’t need to look into DOW index for time being.

So this is good time to investing into stocks. The answer is yes, if we are looking for a long term investment option then it is a golden time but for short term it is not a good market, still there are lot of “grey area” especially credit market. The initial indications from new administration is not so encouraging because they are also still don’t know how to fix it, until everybody clear with how to fix the credit market, we can see unstable market here in U.S and all over world, hence investors keep on invest in gold, bonds and some safe havens.

Source:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=agapqPsrRIEY&refer=home

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/20/economy.history/index.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123487180665799141.html

Recession: Why this severe?

As per basic of investments, if person A lost x amount of money, person B gained the same x amount. The money stays in economy, and person B might reinvest the money for some other purpose, this is called money rotation (my own lay-man term). What happened now is, people lost money on real estate and no body else gained it, the money just evaporated. Lending institute is the one dodging the bullet by writing down bad loans. One question may arise why lending institute is selling at low price now, and can they wait some more time to sell it higher price? But holding a foreclosed asset is high expense than selling it 20-25% price down.

A rough estimation is, an average lending institute holds 90% of home loan value on foreclosed houses. 1 million houses were already foreclosed and almost 6 million will be foreclose with in next year. On each house for sake of argument say lending institute losing $100k, so that equal to 7,000,000 X 100,000 = 700,000,000,000/-, which itself is $700 Billion. So far government gave about $165 Billion as bail out money, which may not enough to cover even legal fees which lending institute accrued over foreclosed houses. So we can’t expect them to loan more to public right now.

The so called money rotation is just frozen to small industries, car loans, student loans and all kinds of loan, so now we are going through a non money flow time as a result catastrophically job loss and severe recession. This is exactly happen in Japan from 1990 to 1999, they had unrecoverable prolong recession for almost a decade and economy again rebounded after digital, plasma TV inventions. But U.S.A is not a Japan, they are the largest consumers and producers in world, U.S.A’s GDP is 13 Trillion and world can’t afford to prolong recession in U.S.A. 

We have to make smart decisions now, yesterday’s Microsoft’s decision to open a retail shops across America is smart one like wise we need to some top tier companies have to spend some money for wise investments. McDonald already planned to open more stores are the best examples of smart decisions at this recession time. This is good time of making long term investments, many millionaires came out of this kind of market. This with government tax cut, spending make economy flourishes again by this year end.

I end my recession series here…

Happy Valentine’s Day…

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreclosure

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/13/microsoft-retail-stores-t_n_166651.html