Thought Garage

Don’t Wait To Be A Hero. You may not get a chance to be a Hero everyday, but there are ample opportunities to change somebody’s life, may be forever.  What a great message, told in such a simpler words. Link to TED talk .

Little long but quite a thought provoking article on whether Software Programming is a craft?  I totally love the full post and couldn’t agree more but here are a few excerpts from the post that stand out. The thing is, at one level software can be described by the utility it provides. It doesn’t matter how ugly it is under the hood as long as it delivers the goods. A programmer can show beautiful software to another programmer, but that’s where the appreciation stops for software per se . A really great programmer (and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a handful over the years) can out-perform a doing-it-for-the-money programmer by orders of literally hundreds, delivering in hours or days what would take an average developer weeks or months. A truly skilled programming team can deliver amazing business results in insanely short amounts of time. Let’s go after some of that! I want your experience. I want your knowledge. I want you to show me “the simplicity the other side ...

A year in review. What the world has been searching through 2010 on Google . Search On : Searching through 2010

With the financial and business muscle Tata’s have, they could have build just any other car for the new age, but they have decided to build a Nano, a car for everybody.  Just watched this video R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) on Active Player , where the speaker was sharing a bit of the story and idea behind building Nano.  Engineer RA Mashelkar shares three stories of ultra-low-cost design from India that use bottom-up rethinking, and some clever engineering, to bring expensive products (cars, prosthetics) into the realm of the possible for everyone. Source : R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products - R.A. Mashelkar (2009) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

The next best bill board could be just your car. If you haven’t seen enough Advertisement in any given day, well, you will pretty soon. Ads are coming to a car near you. Its called ‘Cash Ur Drive’. You can make your car a moving bill board. Read more here . Via Springwise

A book published in 1825 about the Geography of the world, places, people, cultures and so on. I was quite curious to read how and what the people at that time imagined or came to know about the world and more about how they perceived it. Put the context that it was in 1800s and you will be rather surprised and shocked to read it. I loved it. Thanks to Hemanth for sharing the link. Link : Google Picasa Album : Geography Book

“ I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.” -- The Oath of Non-Allegiance, Alistair Cockburn Sold. And Signed.

Alistair Cockburn reading the poem, “ Every story has two sides.. ”

After a few hours with the iPad, I realized that I was feeling a sensation I'd only remembered once before: back in 1995 when someone showed me the World Wide Web. There's no dramatic new technology, we've seen tablets before just as we'd seen hypertext before. But the overall package was game-changer. I don't know if the iPad will be The Device, but I do think that this kind of device will make huge difference to how we read and watch things in the future Source : http://martinfowler.com/bliki/iPad.html

Just watched Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) on Active Player . Physics and marketing don't seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton's second law, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding. Source : Dan Cobley: What physics taught me about marketing - Dan Cobley (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) on Active Player . By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce. Source : Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world - Seth Priebatsch (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Just watched David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) on Active Player . David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world. Source : David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization - David McCandless (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

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

Just watched Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) on Active Player . Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. Source : Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory - Daniel Kahneman (2010) from TEDTalks ( Feed ) via Active Player

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here . Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert. --- Hansel Minutes   So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas. Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, ...

How many times in your whole life have you ever seen individuals or organizations admit their mistakes point blank without giving a spin or excuse? Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong . Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. -- Letter from Apple regarding iPhone 4 And the letter confirms that gripping iPhone 4 in a specific way could hurt its reception and thought its a design issue of iPhone. But I didn’t know that its the same way for any other mobile phone.

Have you ever wondered how much spam you may be receiving on your blog? Make it a point to look at it, you might appreciate the work done by systems and people that are helping to stop this spam like never before. I have been using Akismet to help fighting with spam right from the moment I heard about it. Thanks a ton to Akismet, otherwise, I would have to manually moderate 235,193 spam comments on this blog. Thank you so much, Team Akismet. 99.949% of comments received on this blog are spam. I am delighted that  Akismet could kill the spam and saved me and scared at the same to see so much spam. It is totally unnecessary to include this pie chart here, as you can guess, you can’t miss the point.  I put it any ways in case you haven’t read those numbers above. Looking at this scary % of legitimate comments, I was worried and looked at Akismet website to see how my blog fares to global average of all blogs Akismet currently protects. It seems, I am getting undu...

Wonderful illustration of history of human communication by Google. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before. Source: Google Voice Blog

TIME’s interview (questions collected from TIME magazine’s readers) of Manoj Night Shyamalan, one of my favorite directors. There are movies that anybody can make, and there are movies that are just meant to be made by Manoj. Such a unique talent, I just love his style.

Its a fact of life that " Our civilization runs on software ", as Bjarne Stroustrup said a few years back. Its no stretch to say, If we have to learn about any History, it must be the History of computers then. Learn how all this civilization began at Computer History Museum . I still remember looking at punch cards and floppies and writing my first Program in Fortran back in College. And running those programs on the latest and greatest computers then, a 386. The world of computers and software has changed at a spectacular pace since then. I am glad, I am part of it in my own ways.