Krishna Tatva

Are You Ready to Succeed?

2008-07-01T20:22:00.000-05:00

Unconventional Strategies to Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life.Dr Rao discusses his book...

51 best business movies/documentaries

2008-06-29T15:57:00.007-05:00

Its been 11 months since I started receiving free monthly rental coupons from BLOCKBUSTER video.I haven't had a chance to use them, not even one, so far.Now is the time to go out and see if I can rent one from this list of 51 best business movies/documentaries (English)

50 The Game (1997)
49 Baby Boom (1987)
48 Other People’s Money (1991)
47 Disclosure (1994)
46 Rogue Trader (1999)
45 The Coca-Cola Kid (1985)
44 Antitrust (2001)
43 The Secret of My Succe$s (1987)
42 Nine to Five (1980)
41 What Women Want (2000)
40 Boiler Room (2000)
39 Forrest Gump (1994)
38 Working Girl (1988)
37 Barcelona (1994)
36 Tucker: The Man and his Dream (1988)
35 Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
34 In Good Company (2004)
33 Clerks (1994)
32 Startup.com (2001)
31 Big Night (1996)
30 Stand and Deliver (1988)
29 Erin Brockovich (2000)
28 Jerry Maguire (1996)
27 Wall Street (1987)
26 Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
25 Woman of the Year (1942)
24 The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
23 Trading Places (1983)
22 Michael Clayton (2007)
21 The Aviator (2004)
20 Mildred Pierce (1945)
19 Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992)
18 Shall we Dance? (1996)
17 Office Space (1999)
16 The Insider (1999)
15 One, Two, Three (1961)
14 Lost in Translation (2003)
13 The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
12 Network (1996)
11 Tin Men (1987)
10 The Corporation (2003)
09 All About Eve
08 The Godfather II (1974)
07 Salesman (1968)
06 Modern Times (1936)
05 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
04 Citizen Kane (1941)
03 Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
02 Goodfellas (1990)
01 The Godfather (1972)
00 Yet to be made

Green Fire

2008-04-22T19:04:00.004-05:00

Today is Earth Day.I started Thinking Green and set out to see what was happening in the java world .I came across GreenFire which is a Java-based heating system regulator(open source) and can help you to save some energy and some $$$ as well...

Here is a interview with the author with some interesting details and your chance to make GreenFire even leaner and better...

Whats better than writing software to save the world :)

Bookmarks missing after restarting

2008-04-16T12:18:00.002-05:00

Could not find my firefox bookmarks afterI restarted my laptop (with WinXP) this morning.I guess I did not shutdown properly last night. No big deal ..found a backup copy at the addresss mentioned below and reimported them.
C:\Documents and Settings\logon-name\Application Data \Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\0kail0cj.default\bookmarkbackups

You can minimize the likelihood of future problems by following these suggestions .

Really Cool Phone

2008-02-09T01:19:00.001-06:00

Essential & Free

2008-01-12T18:21:00.000-06:00

Here is a list of free software which I want to try this year :

Ubuntu operating system
AVG antivirus software
Songbird music player and organizer
Gimp & Paint.net drawing and photography
CDBurnerXP cd &dvd burning
Audacity audio Recording
Avidemux video editing
Virtualdub video capture
7-zip file compression
Blender 3d modeling

Any other suggestions ?

I Will Just Start

2007-10-21T11:40:00.000-05:00

Intuit launched "Just Start” campaign which consists of several exciting parts: a way for you to tell your entrepreneurial story or dream online; a contest; a traveling exhibit visiting four major cities; and even free accounting software. At the site you can submit your startup story, either in a short video or in text.By submitting your startup story to the website, you will be entered in the contest for a chance to win a $50,000 startup grant ($40,000 cash and $10,000 in products and services). One of the best features of the site is that the startup stories are right there on it.Here are the rules to enter.Good Luck.

War and Peace

2007-10-13T11:26:00.000-05:00

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and campaigner Al Gore were named as joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize .Congratulations to Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri who is heading the IPCC panel, and Al Gore.As always, Many offered congratulations to the former vice president, while others expressed disdain for him. Some said it was a poor choice, while others flat out dismissed global warming as pseudoscience.
When George Bush took the reigns of US presidency 7 years back,I thought he had a better chance of propagating world peace if not winning the Noble Peace Prize.The paths traveled by Gore & Bush in the years since the recount battle of 2000 have taken them in surprising directions.What a difference 7 years can make?The winner of that struggle went on to capture the White House and to become a wartime leader now heading toward the final year of a struggling presidency. The loser went on to reinvent himself from cautious politician to hero of the activist left now honored as a man of peace.
If Al Gore were president,would America be better off?No one will ever know.

Does Web 2.0 Have a Place in the Enterprise

2007-09-26T23:29:00.000-05:00

Have you rolled out a corporate wiki, encouraged staff to blog and build mashups, or set up shop in Second Life?

Yes we did roll out a wiki and we have quite a few active bloggers in our company :)

Can social networking help foster innovation, or is it just a waste of time and a security threat?

Is Web 2.0 hyped more than anything in the technology industry ?

Does Web 2.0 have a place in the enterprise?

InformationWeek will try to answer these questions in a feature next month, but needs your opinions on how (if at all) Web 2.0 applies to your business.

Here is the survey:
Information Week Survey on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

Useful 2.0

2007-08-04T13:53:00.000-05:00

Recent web 2.0 sites which caught my eye ...

Climezine.com a new, Digg-style news aggregation site where users can rate the relative importance/interest of climate and environmental issues.

CampusExplorer makes it a lot easier to research colleges and universities. Want to go to school in Chicago? Just enter a city, region, or zip code, and Campus Explorer will spit out a list of universities with basic information like the average annual tuition. You can also search by degree type or field of study.

A Bold Move

2007-06-07T09:53:00.000-05:00

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

is your design environment friendly ??

2007-05-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

Premier Farnell has a challenge for YOU!!

The challenge is simple - electronics engineers, academics and students around the world will have the opportunity to submit designs for something that will help to reduce or minimise environmental damage, for example by increasing energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions. Whether a totally self-contained system or a component that makes up a larger product, the winning entry will then be supported by Premier Farnell from initial design towards production. Uniquely the designer will retain the intellectual property and ownership.

This is a design competition that goes way beyond the design.

In addition to the $50,000 cash prize for the winner Premier Farnell is offering a full support package valued at over $50,000 to assistwith taking this design beyond theory and concept towards production.(total value of US$100,000) Five other designs are also eligible forlive-edge Honorable Mentions and US$5,000 cash prizes.

More information @ live-edge.com

best of bLaugh

2007-04-27T15:08:00.000-05:00

Its been a while since I blogged.Whats better than coming back with some very funny cartoons?Even better is to know that those cartoons are about Web 2.0.Enjoy the bLaugh slideshow...

How did they do that?

2007-03-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

I happen to listen to this conversation/interview with Grady Booch on Software Engineering Radio.Interestingly, he is working on Handbook of Software Architecture since 3 years and will be continuing to do so for another 3 years .

The goals of the book in his own words ..

The primary goal of the Handbook of Software Architecture is to fill this void in software engineering by codifying the architecture of a large collection of interesting software-intensive systems, presenting them in a manner that exposes their essential patterns and that permits comparisons across domains and architectural styles.

The second goal of this work is to study these architectural patterns in the context of the engineering forces that shaped them and then to expose a set of proven architectural patterns that may be used to construct new systems or to reason about legacy ones.

The third goal of this work is to feed my insatiable curiosity. Whenever I encounter an interesting or useful software-intensive system, I often ask myself, "how did they do that?" By exposing the inner beauty of these systems through a study of their architectural patterns, I hope to offer inspiration to developers who want to build upon the experience of other well-engineered systems.

As part of that interview When Grady Booch was asked, " What are the key abilities that a software developer must have these days ?".He says ......

Ability to abstract complexity and generate running system (Concrete Abstraction not Philosophical Abstraction ).
Ability to work in teams .Communicate well / Write well in a team.

Interesting Conversation.

founders@work

2007-03-03T10:16:00.000-06:00

How will any one with little bit of interest in web-related-stuff react, if they see GMail, Flickr, Adobe, Apple, Yahoo, Craiglist, Fogcreek, Firefox, Blogger, Paypal, Del.ici.ous and 37Signals being mentioned in one single book? Iam almost positive that they might think of reading such a book (and even buying one).These are some of the applications (names) which many many people use on a daily basis. Jessica Livingston spent two years, interviewing founders of those famous startups and some more , and the result is one such book: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
The book is a collection of interviews with founders/employees of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now (atleast to me). These people tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Probably not many of us will get a chance to speak to these founders and ask all the right questions but Jessica did .It was thrilling to read how technology decisions were made, how frameworks got created , how the byproducts became more famous than the actual ones, how VCs can break a company and so much more .I was not familiar with all the names in the book when I started, but I ended up knowing more about these interesting people, their ideas and the ways they got implemented.I had no clue who Philip Greenspun was before reading the interview with him and I think thats the longest interview in the book and I thoroughly enjoyed it .Ofcourse some interviews were more interesting than others but all in all nothing is boring.
Here are more reviews if you are interested.
Finally this is what I feel now ...any good idea well executed, even repeatedly will be a success.So someone can extend the same idea of compiling the interviews of famous startup founders in their countries (India or United Kingdom or Denmark or any other country ) and Iam sure the result will be equally appealing, if not more .

Popular Prez

2007-02-26T23:24:00.000-06:00

Young India is finally awakening to its democratic rights. And the youth of the country today want to be active participants in moulding the future. Pune-based NGO, Sujeet Shilamkar began an e-campaign in favour of President APJ Abdul Kalam. The mail doing the rounds of youngsters' email inboxes these days asks them to be part of this online petition to the government asking for a second term in office for President Kalam. Besides the online campaign, SMSes rooting for him are also being circulated by students.Kalam's life inspires youngsters because he's reached where he has on the strength of his merit.Despite a difficult and economically challenging childhood,Kalam went on to become oneof the most well-known scientists of India and now the most popular president of India.

Are you human?

2007-02-26T22:40:00.000-06:00

It is sad that now a days machines decide whether you are human or not :)
Do you know what CAPTCHA means?If your ever tried to submit a new digg then you know what it is !!I do not know how it is pronounced but I know that is is actually an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart".You have undoubtedly run into Captcha validations many times. They present code made of of letters and numbers, in the form of an image, not text. The characters are skewed, deformed, or misaligned and designed to be unreadable to the automated programs crawl the web clicking on all links and submitting all forms they encounter.Yes they are designed to be unreadable to automated programs ...but offlate I noticed they are becoming unreadable to humans as well, at least the first time.You will be greeted with a message saying that you entered the wrong code and you will be presented with another captcha.Some poorly designed applications refresh all the page fields and you are forced to enter all the data just because it was not possible distinguish between letter 'e' from 'c'.I am not quite sure at this point how it is being implemented but if implemented in a incorrect fashion your site will have neither robots nor humans :)

Enterprise Mashups Made Easy

2007-02-25T00:43:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

New Version of Java Petstore 2.0 Early Access Released

2007-02-21T17:17:00.000-06:00

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

Try not to laugh :)

2007-02-17T11:23:00.000-06:00

MASHUP

2007-02-17T01:42:00.000-06:00

Seriously, What the hell is a Mashup ?

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

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

Other known mashups :

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

Here are some more . . . .

Hoping to mash up something in coming days :)

thehindu.com sucks

2007-02-15T22:39:00.000-06:00

Usually I catch up all my news with Google News/Reader.My hunger for more India-related-news drives me to those news paper websites occasionally.The Hindu is one site which I visit and honestly, I feel it is deplorable ...they literally drive me off from their site .I feel like calling them up and telling them their website sucks! I just cant stand the way they have their main page . I agree "looks" does not matter much as long as you have "stuff" to offer but they do matter to some extent .....duh!.
The colors they choose , the way they divided their content , the alignment of their header ,the irritating flashy scrollbars,the fonts( irregular sizes/ types/spacing) ,those links that take you to unrelated pages,and of course those ANNOYING ads.... what more do you want to do to make it worse!!! If you(thehindu.com) are listening I just want to mention that these days it is not that expensive to hire a professional web developer who can give a good bang for your buck...come on at least look at other websites and learn something .After all you are India's one of leading newspaper and people expect your website to be of some standard.If you are reading this please leave a comment/suggestion here for thehindu.com to improve their looks.

James Webb Space Telescope

2007-02-15T17:26:00.000-06:00

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

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

Random Acts of Kindness

2007-02-14T15:09:00.000-06:00

The idea of RAK is to do a simple thing to improve the lives of others. Take your neighbor's garbage out, put change in a stranger's expired parking meter, or take flowers to the local nursing home. The concept is "When you help others, you help yourself, too". I experienced one such random act today when a stranger offered a hand in getting my car out of the snow(I in turn helped him to get his car out ).So pay it forward and you'll be repaid in kind... literally!The Random Acts of Kindness website has tons of great ideas on how to be nice this week.

Snowlentaine's Day

2007-02-14T00:26:00.000-06:00

The snow that has hit the Chicago today is a rare occurrence and already ranking as "one of the largest February snows in history," with additional accumulations on the way . I just came back from O'hare airport...All the main streets were drivable but it was very tough to get to those side streets. More than 900 flights had been canceled throughout the day at O'Hare International.My brother is flying from Chicago to NY today and I am trying to track his JetBlue flight which is already delayed by over 6 hours.
It seems people put chairs in the streets of Chicago to hold parking places during the blizzard of 1967 :)