Thursday, September 23, 2004

Quote for the Day

"Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have footing."
~ Albert P. Ryder

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Google plans its own browser

Analysts and several posts on the net suggest that Google is planning a browser of its own.
Obviously...thats the only way to beat MS at its own game. MS has bet on Smart Client technology rather than the applications being delievered over the Network on the browser, because thats how they can keep selling their OS in the next decade.
Several tech evangelist including Larry Ellison of Oracle and IBM with its on-demand buisness have bet on the PC just being a hardware with very little storage and memory and applications being accessed over the browser.
See my earlier posts on the browser wars and how MS has been left out of the race by likes of Safari and Mozilla.
I believe Googles browser will be based on Mozilla.

Product Development goes Collaborative

This is an example of how companies can leverage the strengths of the Net to ensure better sales. Threadless.com, a maker of t-shirts has a member community which participates in the decision of whether to make a t-shirt or not. The designer submits a design for review, and the other members vote for it. If there are enough votes, only then do Thredless manufacture those t-shirt, making sure that the tshirts they produce have a ready market before product launch.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Free Standards Group Announces General Availability Of Linux Standard Base 2.0

This is going to go a long way to ensure that Linux wins a war against Redmond. I think its all about money. Not following standards is lucrative, but I believe this is going to show to the world that Open Standards is also lucrative.
Coupled with support from major venors from Red Flag to Red Hat, this will ensure that developers can have some peaceful sleep.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Project Management Rule # 3

Project Management Rule # 3
there can only be so many developers on a project. It's called the Law of Diminishing Returns.

When you have 1 developer on a project and you bring in another the productivity is actually more than double what the original guy was doing. You get to 5 developers, and that only doubles what 2 guys were doing. It takes nearly 15 to double the work that 5 guys were doing, but you also need 1-3 managers to manage that team.

Project Management rule #3: resources are finite. Objectives are not. Throwing more resources at a project does not make it happen faster. Defining the objectives does.

Did you know...

...that a green skin on potato is a sign that it has toxin in it?
http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw1105
Not only green skin, but also sprouts are signs that potato has higher concentration of toxic glycoalkaloids...
Apparently people can die because of this poison. but for that someone with a bodyweight of 70 kgs have to eat 2 kgs of them.
These glycoalkaloids are produced when potatoes are exposed to light as a protection against the threat from animals who could have eaten them...
Kya concept hai...

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Friday, September 03, 2004

perl.com: Hacking Perl in Nightclubs

perl.com: Hacking Perl in NightclubsIn other words, a musical score is a kind of source code, and a musical performance is a kind of running program. When you play from a musical score or run a program you are bringing instructions to life.

I'm a musician who for the last few years has used Perl as my only musical instrument. I've had some successes, with hundreds of people dancing to my Perl, jumping about to my subroutines, whooping as I started up a new script. To this end, I built a whole library of little compositional Perl scripts that I ran together to make music. However, when running my Perl scripts during a performance I grew to feel as if I wasn't really performing -- I was running software I'd written earlier, so to some extent the performance was pre-prepared. I could tweak parameters and so on, but the underlying structure was dictated by my software. So what's the alternative?