Author Archive

Objects as Actors : Should distribution transparency be embedded into a language design ?

Debasish Ghosh has written an interesting post : Objects as Actors. A very nice post touching upon the frequent debate of what abstraction should be included a piece of software and how should it be modeled. Even though readers and users often express their own views and experiences, it often boils down to the intent [...]

Comprehension consistency at last in Python 3.0!

Comprehension consistency at last in Python 3.0!.
Nice example of how comprehensions in Python 3.0 seem a lot more intuitive.
Earlier in Python 2.5 :

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Nov 14 2008, 19:46:32)
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>>
>>> dict((n, n*n) for n in range(5))
{0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 4, 3: 9, 4: 16}

New [...]

Free Public WiFi SSID is Not Virus ?

Free Public WiFi SSID at WLAN Book.com.
I was told this stuff is a virus so I avoided it. Apparently it isn’t. However the network SSID does seem to have some viral characteristics. In summary :
In reality, this SSID is just one of many viral SSIDs that exist anywhere people are with laptops (almost always Microsoft [...]

Any easier and funnier way to explain SQL injection

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know – The Book [97 Things] : Near-Time

Nice collection of blog posts dealing with architecture.
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know – The Book [97 Things] : Near-Time.

Is documentation more important or answers ?

When people are looking for documentation are they “really” looking for documentation ? This article argues that what people are really looking for is “answers”. So long as you are able to get them, documentation per se may not be the criteria.
James Shore: The Documentation Myth.

Chrome is a security nightmare, indexes your bank accounts

TG Daily – Chrome is a security nightmare, indexes your bank accounts.
This is an interesting side effect of security issues arising out of perhaps indexing that actually works “too well”.

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web.
Nice story about the happenings behind the scenes leading to google chrome.

How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two)

How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two).

Agile or Lean ?

So as you can see, lean and agile are deeply intertwined in the software world. You can’t really talk about them being alternatives, if you are doing agile you are doing lean and vice-versa. Agile was always meant as a very broad concept, a core set of values and principles that was shared by processes [...]

Startup Lessons Learned — Take it with a grain of salt

Another startup lessons learnt essay.
Untitled – Startup Lessons Learned — Take it with a grain of salt.
Summary (for a much more detailed article, follow the link) :

You can’t afford to have a religion.
Communication
Agile development, actually.
Distributed Development isn’t such a great idea…
Don’t file expensive patents when you are pre-seed.
Attention to Detail
Release Early, Release Often
Fire Fast
Highs [...]

Most commonly used blog post title words on ycombinator

As per hacker news .. the 100 most commonly used blog post title words are :
google startup web facebook yc new ask why social app business microsoft |2.0| software world iphone video apple idea site user free vc online internet open search network year news mobile like best hacker make way good |10| ruby application [...]

How to improve your sites credibility – suggestions from the web credibility project – stanford university

Nice set of points for enhancing your sites credibility. Reproducing the bullet points below, the details are on the link referred to.
The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
Highlight the expertise in your organization and [...]

Introducing Ubiquity

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity.
Seems v. promising firefox extension .. allows users to do their own mashups from the browser.
Seems to have a very geeky interface – keyboard command to launch ubiquity and text commands to be entered using keyboard to use it. But definitely [...]

Search experiments, large and small

Nice post listing some of google’s experiments in sometimes small and seemingly trivial aspects of their search.
Official Google Blog: Search experiments, large and small.
Experimentation is a very powerful tool, and we use it very widely to test potential changes to search. At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google [...]

Cheaper Talent Hypothesis

MF Bliki: CheaperTalentHypothesis.
Martin Fowler’s commentary on why cheaper talent is more expensive !
Naturally better programmers cost more, either as full-time hires or in contracting. But the interesting question is, despite this, are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?
…
If the cost premium for a more productive developer is less than the higher productivity of that developer, then [...]

Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research

Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research | Gadget Lab from Wired.com.
Sad .. but probably necessary under the current economic scenario.
After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs’ fundamental physics research lab.
…
Bell Labs was one of [...]

Unit testing is doomed when it’s an elephant

The Disco Blog » Blog Archive » Unit testing is doomed when it’s an elephant.
Very nice commentary on why it is difficult to take up automated unit testing in many shops (with a slight focus on Java shops)
The question remains, however; is unit testing doomed? The answer to this question, of course, depends on your [...]

Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster

SUP (Simple Update Protocol) is a simple and compact “ping feed” that web services can produce in order to alert the consumers of their feeds when a feed has been updated. This reduces update latency and improves efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent polling.
FriendFeed Blog: Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster.

Enterprise Java Community: Building a Scalable Enterprise Applications Using Asynchronous IO and SEDA Model

Enterprise Java Community: Building a Scalable Enterprise Applications Using Asynchronous IO and SEDA Model.
A nice article providing an overview of SEDA architecture and showing an example of building an application using the same along with tomcat and mule, and benchmark results thereof

• Categories

  • Interesting

• Tags

  agile apple architecture behaviour browser business community digg domain economics engineering google hr humour india intelligence interviews iphone java leadership learning management misc mobile new tech outsourcing people programming project management quotes recruitment requirements scalability security site-design software development startups support talent tdd team leading testing usability utility web