Thought Garage

Wonderfully simple and easy to read book for all ages, " 20 Things I learned about Browsers and The web " from Google Chrome team. Must read for all that would love and enjoy web. Wonderful book for all ages by Google  You can read it online right from your browser or download the PDF version of the book. If you are curious to know more how a browser really works, you may check this wonderful cartoon book from none other than the Google Chrome team itself :  The Chrome, Comic Book .

Chris Anderson and Wired offer yet another riveting conclusion (sounds like a prediction for some of us) that the Web as we know is dead as we are getting more and more connected on the internet with apps and devices. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. -- The Web Is Dead. Long Live Internet, Wired I agree 100%, as it is just a fact for how I consume content on the internet. Almost (99%) everything I do on the internet is done through a custom application (mostly on iPhone and iPad) rather on the web. Active Learning Suite In fact the applications I have been building as part of Active Learning suite exemplify the same conclusion about web.  Active Player lets you enjoy and learn from your favorite videos and podcasts without ever visiting a single web page. If a website doesn’t offer an RSS Feed, you can create your own RSS Feed of any content available on the internet with Active Feeds and help the rest of the world...

Listening now: Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains on Active Player . Dr. Moira Gunn sits down with author, Nicholas Carr, to discuss the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live, through the pages of his new book, The Shallows: What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains. Source : Nicholas Carr - What the Internet is doing to our Brains from IT Conversations via Active Player

Google's logo for the 4th of July with a Goldberg's machine (its also Rude Goldberg's birthday).

Vonage World Plan that gives unlimited calling to India and 60 other countries is now only $14.99 per month (for first six months). Sign up Now and Get another Extra Month FREE! Vonage started a while back offering UNLIMITED Calling plan to India along with 60 other countries for $24.99 a month. This international calling is on top of full month unlimited calling within in USA. The plan is only $14.99/month for the first six months and $25.99/month then onwards and need a 1 year agreement. Take it Anywhere. If you don’t know, You can take the Vonage Modem anywhere you go, as long as you have an internet connection.

Every now and then I get curious about what Indians are searching for on the internet and go to Google to have a look. This time, I am totally surprised to see that Manipur tops in number of searches beating all other IT curious states. Top Search Keywords in 2009 The following screenshot lists out top 10 keywords originated from India in 2009. Note that these key words are not exactly what is being searched for, but these key words are part of searches. News, Jobs, Electronics and Travel For instance, ‘India’ is part of the following searches that tops the list. News Papers top the list, compared to 'movie stars’ last time I looked at this kind of data. Next most searched for was “Songs” This doesn’t surprise me at all, the next most searched for is a place to access, play and download songs. Manipur tops the list This is totally surprising to me, that Manipur tops the list beating those IT curious states in keywords related to India. Andhra Pradesh is no...

I wondered last night why NDTV.com is so desperate ? Desperate enough to put Advertisements right on top of content and those ads won’t let you read content unless you click on them. This morning, out of curiosity I checked how NDTV.com is doing by looking at traffic on the site at Compete. And this graph may explain the desperation. Unique visitors to NDTV.com dropped by 40% in 2009. Source: NDTV.com Profile on Compete.com However, the site was able to maintain number of page views more or less the same. So, it sounds little obvious that as they are loosing on unique visitors, they may want to monetize those still visiting and make up for the difference. May be! Or that Ads on top of content may be just a bug. Hopefully.

Google is really obsessed with "Speed". Google's browser Chrome is already the fastest browser in the world (2X the nearest competitor) and here is some news that will just blow your mind. Your web could get 2X faster. Wow!!!! Today we'd like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. ... So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance - pages loaded up to 55% faster. Source: Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

Recently Vonage started offering Unlimited Calls to India under its $24.99/m existing plan. Good thing is that the plan includes both landlines and cell phones all over India. If you are already a Vonage subscriber, make sure you have Vonage World plan to get this great deal. Not sure whether it is automatically done. For me, I did convert to this plan explicitly. If you are not a Vonage subscriber already, think about it. For $24.99 you get unlimited calling to India (and about 60 countries) and have a landline number to make unlimited calls within US. Get ONE month FREE. Vonage initially offered 2 months FREE when you sign up for this service. But now it is back to its original offer of ONE month FREE offer. Get ONE MONTH FREE if you signup by clicking on the image below. If you pay whole one year upfront, you may get an additional 20% off.   Click here to get the ONE MONTH FREE offer.

Its funny how Experts are made in America. Rule No.1 : You can become an Expert on anything just by claiming you are already one. So much for dreaming big and believing in yourself. And once you are an Expert (or rather once you claim) you will be treated like an Expert !! BTW, an expert’s observation on Cloud Computing. It is really funny. Please read. Microsoft's Azure cloud is a place you go to in order to build your applications. In the process, you are very likely to use Visual Studio, the .Net Framework, SQL Server in the form of Azure SQL Services, and Microsoft SharePoint, then run the resulting cloud application in Azure itself. So is Azure just a super sales site for Microsoft products? No, no more so than Google's AppEngine is a sales site for PHP tools, even though you will write your application in PHP if you want to take advantage of the AppEngine. - Charles Babcock at Information Week’s Cloud Computing Section If you are wondering is cloud –...

These days, not a single day goes by without talking, hearing or reading something about Cloud Computing. It appears, the whole cloud (I mean the world; don’t blame me for overusing the word ‘cloud’, I just want to make a point) is totally excited about ‘Cloud’ suddenly. In a way, Cloud Computing is the new web2.0, in terms of hype, buzz and activity all around. Every business has something to offer ‘on cloud’. Every consultant is busy selling strategies to cash in on the cloud. And every analyst is preparing a report on the cloud. Every developer is trying to equip to engineer applications on the cloud. Simply put .. What is really Cloud computing is all about? Why not look up the definition of Cloud Computing by going to the Encyclopedia on the cloud (??), Wikipedia. The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet , based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals. – Wikipedia ...

“..software is perhaps the ultimate building material: it springs from pure thought and is intrinsically malleable, yet it can be made manifest in our hardware systems, limited only by our vision ..” – Grady Booch Mint.com is an idea about 3 years back. Now its a 170M business (with projections running in Billions of dollars in next few years) that helps millions of people save money and organize their finances. There is no doubt, it would be every aspiring entrepreneur’s dream to convert their idea into a multi million dollar business. If you are one of those, this 22 minute talk by Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint.com is a must watch. There are some great tips on mechanics but also quite an invaluable advice on the most important aspect of any business, managing finances.   Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo . Towards the end of the presentation, Aaron talks about what building Mint.com really meant to him (along with tons of money tha...

I wrote some time back in February Shifting Away From Tables To Entity Models discussing about fast adoption of Entity models for highly scalable systems moving away from RDBMS modeling and RDBMS databases. DataStore (based on Google’s Big Table) in Google App Engine is an excellent contrast between  these two models. RDBMS relational data management systems, simply put, most Database systems allow us to create data models of businesses in terms of rows and columns in a table. Tables can be ‘related’ to indicate dependencies of data between tables. RDBMS was on the best things that ever happened to software abstractions. Every business domain has been modeled to be a set of tables and relations between them. However, recently another paradigm is taking shape (at least, I only noticed it in the last year), called as Domain Driven Development, DDD for short, that emphasizes the importance of modeling a business in the domain of the business itself rather than dictated ...

A nice tutorial of UI Design Fundamentals For Programmers by Ryan Singer of 37 Signals. UI Fundamentals for Programmers by Ryan Singer from ChicagoRuby on Vimeo .

Long tail made possible by internet is really good. Anybody can produce anything and reach its community however small that community can be. Any music album will find some audience. However, anybody in that long tail make any money? It appears, a large chunk of it don’t.   A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs. Op-Ed Columnist - Swan Songs? - NYTimes.com

Vonage started offering Unlimited Calls to India under its $24.99/m existing plan recently that include both landlines and cell phones. The 2 Months free offer is still available, if you haven’t signed up yet. Today, Vonage released a Mobile application that can be installed on Blackberry, iPhone or iPod touch that will allow you to make international calls right from your Mobile at Vonage rates. It uses WiFi if available. Otherwise it uses your normal voice minutes on your Mobile like you are making a local call even when you are make an international calls. Remember you will pay for Vonage International Calling Rates for each call you make, in addition to your cell phone minutes when you use cell phone network instead of WiFi. It is bad you can not use your existing Vonage account to this mobile application. Hope Vonage will soon allow that too. You need to setup a credit or debit card and pay per use. I guess, Vonage will soon allow to connect your existing account and sh...

Cloud Computing is the new web2.0, in terms of hype and buzz all around. I hate to invent yet another Buzzword. But isn’t Cloud Computing just a Hardware-As-A-Service (HaaS)? If you look at the definition on Wikipedia, that is what Cloud Computing is all about. Isn’t it? Cloud computing is an example of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet . – Wikipedia If you agree in principle that Cloud Computing = HaaS, then there is nothing really NEW about it. It must be as old as the concept of renting a server or the first internet Hosting company. And, all internet (as well as in house applications) that we know of did scale as needed. They are all in principle dynamically scalable. Didn’t they? Then why so much undue buzz about Cloud Computing? Is it because now there are more players in the hosting market? Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace … etc. Or is it because of the new Billing model of ...

Its quite easy to start developing an ASP.NET Web application. Now, it got even better to jump start a Web application with Toolkits. Just download a toolkit, quickly load in Visual Studio and just run it. And then extend it to fit your needs. Web Application Toolkits are designed to enable Web Developers to simply extend their web application capabilities by providing them with a packaged set of running samples, templates and documentation. The goal for the Web Application Toolkits is to provide Web Developers with resources such as project templates, controls, and code samples along with simplified documentation all in a consistent packaged format that is easy to download and run in a very short period of time. http://misfitgeek.com/blog/aspnet/microsoft-web-application-toolkits/

There was so much pressure on Indian IT Services firms for a long time to enter product space and they refused and insisted that Services is the key. After all, their strength and  innovation is in creating market driven and efficient service delivery models.  They not only succeeded with flying colors in delivering services, they influenced the entire world to turn to services. So in more than one way, there were right on about services.  Some key milestones that indicate the strong inclination towards services just the way Indian IT Services headed all along: IBM once synonymous with PC sells its iconic PC Business and rebrand itself as IT services (or emphatically Smart Solutions for the planet) HP buys EDS and says it is critical to enter Services business as profits drop in all other directions. Dell buys Perot Systems, seen as following HP. Xerox , the iconic innovator buys Affiliated Computer Services, citing exactly the same reason of survi...

Google Chrome’s Telugu rendering was awful when it was first released and until a few days ago. The latest version of Google Chrome now renders Telugu fonts quite better (still inferior in crispness to Apple Safari). Try it out and see for yourself.