May 2008
27 posts
Over half of US top 100 websites fail Yahoo’s... →
Cute game - Music Catch →
Nice way to pass a little time. The developer of the game is Reflexive.com. Vasudev Ram
Python voted favorite scripting language by Linux... →
Saw this news (you’ll have to scroll down a bit down the page at that link) via a post on comp.lang.python.announce which is an interesting resource for info on what new stuff (like releases of Python-related software) is happening in the Python world. The post was by Steve Holden, one of the veterans of the Python community. - Vasudev Ram
Very good article on Google Web Toolkit - pros and... →
Just saw this article on IBM developerWorks - a very good article on the Google Web Toolkit - gives a small tutorial and talks some about its pros and cons. Interestingly, apart from mentioning a few cons (not just pros), it also has a link (see the Resources section of the article) to a blog post by a blogger who thinks that the GWT and similar approaches - of eschewing JavaScript by allowing the...
Useful - Twitter Status Blog →
This blog gives updates on the status of the Twitter service. Should be useful to regular Twitter users who want to check why Twitter is down, when it may come up again, etc. Got to know about via this post on one of Fred Wilson’s blogs. Incidentally, the post says that the Twitter Status blog is powered by Tumblr. - Vasudev Ram
Innovative: Summize and its search API →
The Summize Search API About Summize (excerpt from their site): “Summize’s mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations. Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews. Additional sources of online conversations are...
Open source competition 'made Microsoft stronger'... →
According to this ZDNet blog post by Mary Jo Foley, talking about his speech at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference: - Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that it often takes a strong competitor to truly galvanize Microsoft. - “Microsoft has built up a culture of crisis,” Ozzie told conference attendees. He acknowledged that Google is a...
Free Sysinternals Windows utilities now available... →
Seen on ZDNet.com. I’ve used the Sysinternals utilities some, myself, and particularly like the AutoRuns tool. It allows you to remove a lot of autoloading crud that tends to slow down your PC’s bootup speed over time, as you keep installing various software apps. Works pretty well. Excerpts: “If you troubleshoot Windows PCs for fun or profit, then chances are you’ve used one or...
" The Faces and Voices of Google" →
Article on FastCompany.com about the spirit at Google. Interesting one … read it. - Vasudev Ram
World's first programmable newspaper →
Saw this recently. It’s about the reported plans of the New York Times to provide an API for its content, for developers to use. Read more here. - Vasudev Ram
Facebook may Open Source its Facebook Platform →
Seen on TechCrunch . According to the article, this move is in response to Google’s OpenSocial, which is also open source. This may be a significant move as it means any other social networking site can now get similar functionality to the Facebook Platform; however, as the article notes, doing that will not be easy. - Vasudev Ram
Video: InfoQ interview - Mark Nottingham,... →
Mark Nottingham talks about how Yahoo! uses Web technologies to create high performance architecture for their many web properties with high traffic. An interesting video. As a Yahoo! Mail user for a long time (from back when it was called RocketMail before Yahoo! acquired it, in fact :), I’ve seen that their mail service has mostly performed very well over the years, despite the undoubtedly...
Write web apps in C++ with the Wt library and... →
Saw this today. “Wt is a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications.” It’s by a Belgium-based company, emweb. Tried the online examples out a bit. Looks interesting. Apart from the fact of being able to write web apps with it in C++, some other Wt features of interest are: - *all* your app code is written in one language - C++ (as far as I...
Third-party ads now available on Google AdSense... →
The link above is the announcement on the Google AdSense blog. Here’s the FAQ - Vasudev Ram
Microsoft to pay users to search →
Hard to believe? Its true. Read more here - Vasudev Ram
Google's oCERT security team for open source →
“Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software. oCERT, short for the open source computer emergency response team, will aim to remediate security vulnerabilities and exploits in a wide range of open source programs by coordinating communication among publishers.” The...
Some useful Google blogs
Official Google blog Google Docs blog Official Gmail blog Inside AdSense - Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
Plaxo to be acquired by Comcast →
Just heard about this: ”Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast” Here is the official announcement. They are not releasing the financial details of the deal. - Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
1 million Linux-based motherboards a month →
Seen on http://news.zdnet.co.uk: ”Asus is to embed a lightweight, instant-on version of Linux called “Splashtop” into all its motherboards, following good feedback from customers.” According to the article, Joe Hsieh, general manager of Asus’ motherboard business unit, said they plan to embed a lightweight, instant-on version of Linux called “Splashtop”...
Gullfoss: EU's largest waterfall and... →
Read more here Vasudev Ram
HP to Acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion
Saw this recently. It looks like a significant deal in the IT space. More here on my main blog. - Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
Google speeds up Gmail initial loading speed →
Interesting post on the official Gmail blog about this performance improvement. I think I had noticed - some days ago - that Gmail seemed somewhat faster recently, than it had been for some time, after they had made that change - some months ago - to do a lot of prefetching before displaying the inbox fully. Looks like they keep doing regular performance tuning on Gmail - a good thing, all right,...
IBM alphaworks - Method Scheduler for Java →
Here’s another Java scheduler software. IBM alphaWorks - http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com - has a lot of interesting stuff worth checking out, for developers … - Vasudev Ram - http://www.dancingbison.com
Awk, Nawk and Gawk cheat sheet →
The main site (at which the above cheat sheet lives) also has some other good cheat sheets - such as for aspects of bash, Perl, etc. - and some other interesting information. - Vasudev Ram - http://www.dancingbison.com
Flux Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow. →
Checking out open source Java schedulers for a new project of mine. (This one - Flux - is commercial, though they have a fully functional 30 day evaluation version for download). Quartz is one of the open source Java schedulers - see http://www.opensymphony.com/quartz/ . IIRC, it was used by some product(s) at Veritas Software (now Symantec Corp.) where I worked earlier. - Vasudev Ram -...
H2 database - Java SQL database - successor to... →
From the H2 site: Very fast, free for everybody, source code is included Embedded, server and cluster modes JDBC and ODBC API; browser based Console application Written in Java; can be compiled with GCJ and IKVM.NET Small footprint: around 1 MB I had made my xtopdf toolkit - see http://www.dancingbison.com/products.html - work with the HSQLDB database, so that its database data...
Cellphones that could save your life →
Good article on Forbes.com about beneficial features/services on cellphones. - Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
April 2008
5 posts
WatchGreat talk by DHH at YCombinator’s Startup School 2008. His key points: - charge for your apps (people have been doing it for hundreds of years :) - you can target the Fortune 5,000,000 (Fortune 5 million) consisting of small and medium sized companies, instead of only considering large enterprises - probability of making a few millions is higher than of making a billion or two - building...
Apple buying P A Semi a sign of coming vertical... →
Sramana Mitra’s Forbes.com column this week, “The Coming Convergence”, talks about the Apple acquisition of P A Semi, that I blogged about in my previous post. Her key points are that: - vertical integration may be coming back to the computer industry (which was how it was originally, e.g. companies like IBM made everything, including their own hardware, operating systems,...
Apple Buying Chip Designer? →
This Forbes article reports the purchase, and talks about the possible benefits etc. The chip design firm, P A Semi, that Apple is buying, seems to have some chops - engineers of their team apparently earlier worked on the Itanium, Opteron, UltraSparc, and StrongARM processors. The article goes on to say that this “could spell a new future for Apple’s flagship iPhone and possibly...
ScanR looks interesting →
From the site: ”Turn your camera phone into a scanner, copier, and fax.” Clean photos of documents, whiteboards and business cards. Extract any text and contact information Store, search and share online Freemium biz model. - Vasudev Ram
Test post to try Apture.com features
This is a test post to try out Apture.com features - for which I signed up just recently. The Apture code snippet is purposely inserted in the wrong place to see what happens - whether it works, gives any error, etc. Once I’ve checked that I’ll remove it and put it in the proper place - probably not on this site. Here is a link about Java: Sun Java site Vasudev Ram
November 2007
6 posts
TED Prize 2008 announced →
Just saw this in my inbox - an email announcement from TED.com, of which I’m a member: “The TED Prize was introduced in 2005, and it is unlike any other award. Although the winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, the real prize is that they are granted a WISH. “A wish to change the world”. There are no formal restrictions on the wish. We ask our winners to think big and...
ShapeWriter - an IBM Research spinoff →
Looks cool … This is a technology first developed at IBM Research, according to the site.
Cool anagram site - try replacing the 'firstname'... →
Chris Double used the anagram site to get the name for his site BluishCoder … :) http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/
Cyclone: A Safe Dialect of C →
Seen on Chris Double’s new site - http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz He’s a developer who writes some interesting stuff, including a lot on functional languages.
Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and...
Via Lifehacker.com. Here
July 2007
1 post
OpenAdaptor →
An adaptor framework for middleware. First used by Dresdner Kleinwort for their internal systems. ”About openadaptor Openadaptor is a Java software toolkit for Enterprise Application Integration. It was written to help a large financial organisation integrate its applications with Message Oriented Middleware. The toolkit provides a framework and components for building links between systems...
June 2007
1 post
Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series
Ruby getting more mainstream and “recognized” … great! Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series. You can sign up for their newsletter, RED :-), to be informed about new books published, etc.: Get R E D
Obie Fernandez is the series editor. He’s also writing a book for the series, The Rails Way, due to be published in fall 2007. Vasudev Ram (via jugad)