Weekend Read

• Why Software Is Eating The World 

• Fair Boss Fall Behind

How Software Companies Die - by Orson Scott Card

Got this accidentally & thought of sharing with you - interesting read!

The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa. Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.
You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language. They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine. They'll never understand it.  Continue reading ...

The Internet of Things [INFOGRAPHIC]

In 2008, the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on Earth. And this is growing exponentially. With IPv6 we will have enormous capacity to connect new devices to the internet. Check this interesting article (infographic) from cisco

Ruby is good but Lua is ...

Someone said, if you are bored of doing the daily chores learn a language. Someone else said if you are becoming dull learn a language. So I did - I picked Ruby. This also coincides with my thought of how do we (developers) become more productive - is there a better productive language than Java!

 
I took few hours to set it up - mostly due to Eclipse Ruby plugin - failed couple of times due to proxy setting. Thanks to Srinivas (one of the Architect in my team) who pointed me to proxy setting. With that done I started looking into the language and get going with "Hello Ruby!" program. My first impression was "Ruby is good". Now I think it is "Ruby is beautiful"!

While I am continuing my Ruby journey and I was also looking at the popularity of the language and eventually checked the ranking of Ruby - at programming community index. Ruby ranked 12. Not bad. But look at the language just above Ruby - at rank 11 is Lua. In terms of popularity gain Lua is 2nd position below objective-C.

Will dirty my hand on Lua as well but if you are a developer keep looking at programming community index.

Ubuntu & Home Media Server

It was pending for long. Downloaded 11.04 and made a USB installer. Boot the system from USB - you have to change booting option (F2 during startup). I already have Vista installed - so I tried just plain booting from the USB. It's real fast and simple. However, making it bootable from the hard disc - dual bootable - Vista and Ubuntu takes time as my hard disc was not partitioned earlier. Hmmmmm - this really takes time.

It is all set now. Anyone can do - absolutely lay man's job.

My next step would be to set up a media server. Did some basic research - looks like UPnP - MediaTomb is doing good. Vineet & I talked briefly about having a media server for our small apartment community - let's see how it comes up. If you have done this before - share your experience and knowhow.

July 9 - Installed MediaTomb - installation is pretty straight forward. However, I had trouble in figuring how the client (player) will find the server. Vineet figured out that IGMP protocol needs to be enabled on the server side. MediaTomb FAQ site has the details on how to enable IGMP.

Great! It's up and running now! Thanks Open Source -:)

Business of API & Data

Application Programing Interface, in short, API is very common term for any software professional. Once, one cross "Hello World" or "This is my first program" in the programming worlds - you get to the world of APIs. These low level programing constructs are becoming business drivers in the world of web beyond browser.

Look at these 3 company in this space - Apigee, BlueVia & Mahery.  They all manage APIs and  help developers in building application using these APIs. Intersting enough that BlueVia is a spin off from Telefonica  - a large telecommunication company.

ProgrammableWeb, directory of API and Mashup listed 3375 APIs and 5886 Mashups as on today. You can look for API and start using.

So, is this is a new business model? From developing a web to developing APIs. API-as-a-Service. Looks like future will be on using the APIs to mine the data and build innovative apps based on these 2!

Mon's winning art work at Bangalore Art competetion

Here is Mon's winning art work at Bangalore Art competetion organized by 3 Peel on June 19 at UB City. Top left one.