Thought Garage

I love to surf the web. For fun. For information. Many times, as part of my work. Everytime, I visit a nice website, I used to write down the URL in my notebook or send in email so that I will have a note some where. But I often find it very difficult to get the url when I really needed it. Used to send an email whenever I wanted to share with somebody. But none of my buddies have no idea where I have been wandering, unless I send them an email. Not any more. I found del.icio.us website, an easy way to post urls from anywhere and get them back when I really need it. My buddies can instantly see the urls I post. Not just that; when they see an url that I like, they can automatically post it for me. Excellent way to keep in touch. So from now onwards del.icio.us will be the host of my surfing journal. Here is the address: http://del.icio.us/mkmurali And here is the rss feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/mkmurali

Software is invisible to most of the world. Although individuals, organizations, and nations rely on a multitude of software-intensive systems every day, most software lives in the interstitial spaces of society, hidden from view except insofar as it does something tangible or useful. Despite its transparency, as Bjarne Stroustrup has observed, "our civilization runs on software." It is therefore a tremendous privilege as well as a deep responsibility to be a software developer. It is a privilege because what we do collectively as an industry has changed and will continue to change the world1. It is a responsibility because the world in turn relies on the products of our labor in so many ways2. In the context of that labor, 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 (and certain immutable laws of physics and software3). As softw...

Robin Good, who assumes himself a communication expert who can teach to communication experts recently announced a Design Challenge, 'The MasterNewMedia Design Challenge', an open interface design contest to redesign hiw own website. Why? I guess he could not do. I am afraid he don't understand what makes a good user interface, let alone how to design one. Anyway, finally deadline arrived. Robin must have been dreaming of thousands of proposals and must have allocated his next few weeks to review them. But there were NO official entries to the competition. He was however seem to be delighted to update the news saying that he did receive ONE submission before the deadline. Oh, it saved a life. I first visited this website around 6 months back. The compilation of articles was good. So I added to my rss reader. As I started reading for a while his blog posts, I did not see any originality in his blogs. I never see Robin in his own posts. Most of them are mere compilations...

A few weeks ago, Wal-mart filed an application with the Reserve Bank of India to setup an office in Bangalore for market research and business development. News story at http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1397292.cms by The Economic Times Still a long way to go for Walmart to do anything in India.....but Indian Retailers better watch out!!

It is fascinating to know how the entire wikimedia site is hosted by using only open source products. Link to Wikimedia Servers Page Its quite an amazing act to support such an ever increasing traffic. with an average response of 1.5sec to load a page.

I found this very interesting paper " Web search for a Planet:The Google Cluster Architecture " on wikipedia web site, while reading how the Wikimedia servers are hosted.

There was a posting 'Perpetual' by Rakesh discussing about two articles published by New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that described how adolescence is increasingly being stretched into adulthood. Link to posting 'Perpetual' by Rakesh Khurana Few points to note from his posting talking about the articles mentioned: 1. A new generation of American parents are involving too much in the education of their children. "A new generation of overinvolved parents [who] are flooding campus orientations, meddling in registration and interfering with students' dealings with professors, administrators and roommates". 2. Many parents are considering thier children's education as an investment, and expect to be treated as customer by universities. 3. Youngsters are depending on their parents for everything and expect parents to solve their problems. A bottle-fed upbringing has created a dependent generation that expects their parents to solve all their pro...