Thought Garage

Most of my friends use Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail or rediffmail. What it takes to send an email to receive an email. Open an account with Yahoo or Hotmail or Gmail or as a matter of fact any email provider. Irrespective of what mail service each of us use, we can send mails to each other and receive from each other. Its cool. But what it takes to send an instant message or chat with my friends? Unfortunately the answer is not as simple as with the email. I need an account with each of these, since the messengers from these companies will not work together. I can not talk from my Yahoo messenger to a buddy who uses MSN mesenger. I can not talk to a friend who is on AOL. Now the new entry in to the instant messenger, googleTalk, do not address this issue either. If you install googletalk you can only talk to buddies who use googletalk. I ended up installing all kinds of messengers including the new actors on the scene, skype and google talk on my laptop, so that I can always stay in tou...

There are some things Google Search engine does a lot better than all other search engines. The most important one is the relevance of search results to the query. Used google for some time, and I kinda fell in love with it. When MSN search is out, I tried it to see if it is better. I was very disappointed then, and the same to date. Here is a latest example. I was trying to locate any web casts on webservices recently. I opened specifically the on-demand webcasts page, http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/ondemand.mspx and gave a query in the search box "Web Service, webcast". There are 10 results on the first page with 3 results belong to 2005 and the rest to 2004. And nothing leads to a specific page with latest webcast on web services. Here are the top 3 results. Month of August did not appear in the first page at all: Webcast Archive: July 2005 Search Microsoft.com for: Go Browse by Type Information For Resources Product Families Events Worldwide Webcast Archiv...

Found an excellent course outline to learn Web Services in Java. The outline is very detailed, precise and has links to valuable resources on the web. Web Services Programming Course Root Page

An interesting summary of thoughts on what Service Oriented Architecture mean to different people by Martin Fowler. Each camp says aloud one and just one aspect of it and calls it the SOA. But he summarized all of them and bunched them together to see the real picture. It proved to be very true to me, after being struggled to see through the marketing jargon and hyped up talks to comprehend what it really means. I am afraid, very few understood what really matters. MF Bliki: ServiceOrientedAmbiguity

It is not uncommon in India to buy attendees for Political rallies to demonstrate strength of support in the public. And it is quite common to buy film stars to attend major functions to add some glamour to the evening. But have you ever heard of buying some guests to appear in a marriage?   I Came across a news story(Entrepreneur cashes in on rented revellers, http://www.freelanceuk.com/news/1311.shtml ) talking about a booming business of " arranging" guests for marriages in India. The enterprise, called "The Best Guests Centre" in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India supply guests in the required traditional attire to the ocassion for a charge. The madeup guests do everything they can do to make sure that the ocassion is celebrated in the true(?) spirit.   What else you can buy for your marriage? Hell no. Don't say, bride.  

India is seeking loan from World Bank for its “Bharat Nirman” program, aimed at developing rural infrastructure. Why the much hyped super power nation is kneeling before World Bank for a loan to build infrastructure ?    There are so many nations in the world that desperately need those funds from world bank.   The government impose surcharge on every conceivable thing to contribute to meaningless and truly political war against Pakistan. How can India afford so much on military while they invest so less on infrastructure. Why don't they impose surcharge towards building the much needed infrastructure?   Why doesnÂ’t the Indian government ask the IT corporate houses to contribute towards building infrastructure? Keep aside the social responsibility; IT big houses are the ones minting money on the existing infrastructure and hefty pro-business incentives (that are making an ordinary citizenÂ’s life much harder), and they should pay back.   The...

The following posting at MSDN .NET security blog points to a comparison study, "Comparing Java and .NET Security: Lessons Learned and Missed" done by   Nathaneal Paul and David Evans from the University of Virginia Computer Science Department . The research was funded by National Science Foundation and DARPA. Link to the Document : http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nrp3d/papers/computers_and_security-net-java.pdf Comparing Java and .NET Security http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2005/08/17/452760.aspx It is very interesting and very informative to compare .NET and Java in depth on what matters for security. In summary, .NET has ZERO major security vulnerabilities reported while Java has its list growing.     Update on 10th Feb 2005: 7 more vulnerabilities found in Java runtime. Read the sun's announcement.

Some things will never change in India like relying on Astrologers to do any thing important.  Go and seek an astrolger to start some thing. Go and seek Astrologer if some thing does not workout.  Go and seek Astrologer if some thing works out well.   If it worksout well, then soon the astrolger would become a saint. He will be worshipped. If not, never mind, people will look for another. This goes on until they find one Astrologer where some thing will finally workout. And a few days later, they start searching again.   I recently came to know about an incident, where a girl who has been searching for a  job in Bangalore, was advised by an Astrologer to try in a different direction, as  in Bangalore nothing would workout for her. She also had to goto a famous temple to do special rituals. They decided to move from Bangalore to Hyderabad to look for a job.   I do not understand how it would help. And neither they do. This is what they believe in....

A few years back, if you are spending around 55 hours a week on your computer, you better be a geek. You are working out of passion to create some breaking product or in a Silicon Valley startup company. But this is no longer true. These days, most of the Software Developers are 'spending' atleast 55 hours a week, ending up in a 11 hour day at office or work through the weekend. I wonder, why the life is becoming so hard for the software developers. Here are some of the responses I came across: --> Work load is too much. Organizations are cutting the costs by reducing the man power while the amount of work keeps going up. --> Software development is becoming highly complex and to stay current, you have to spend lots of time in managing the new stuff. --> If you are not slogging, you must have finished your assigned job and you may get new assignment. So to avoid new work, pretend slogging. --> If you are not slogging, then you are looked as if you are not committed ...