1

[Email Alert] Hi, add me as your friend.

[Message] Do I know you?

[Reply] No! Who are you and how did you get my email ID?!

[Message] You just added me as a friend in Orkut.

[Reply] That must be by mistake. But what the hell, let us be friends!

[Message] But we don’t know each other.

[Reply] So what? Let us be friends and get to know each other.

[Message] But I would want to know you first before making friendship!

[Reply] Okay, bye then.

2

[Email Alert] Hi, add me as your friend.

[Message] Do I know you?

[Reply] No, do you know me?!

[Message] No.

[Reply] Let us be friends then.

[Message] But we don’t know each other!

[Reply] You’re so rude! Why don’t you just accept my friendship?

………..

A new search engine, which they call Computational Knowledge Engine, is going to be launched tomorrow evening. Wolfram Alpha, built by mathematician Stephen Wolfram, will give you a single definitive answer for your queries instead of pointing you to a page of results with links which may or may not give you what you were looking for. Their demo looks very promising and I feel that it could give Google a challenge to re-define their search to include such a cool way of searching things. Although the Internet has talks about it that it will be a threat to Google, Mr. Wolfram doesn’t want to encourage such hype.

“I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company in Champaign, Ill., that has been quietly developing WolframAlpha.

Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now. [Newyork Times: New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google ]

Go ahead, check out their demo, blog and wait for the grand release which will be broadcasted live.

(Thanks to KK for the info)

When the recession hits you badly, outsourcing/freelancing is one way to rescue yourself. Recession can hit freelancing too, but there is no better time for small-scale freelancing as there are more projects being outsourced to India during this time. Even though there are projects being pumped this way, the pay has become too low because of the cheap bidding by service providers. This low-standard way of bidding has made it almost impossible for quality service providers to survive in the business.

The websites like Scriptlance or Elance offer projects on a bidding basis. It is not an easy task to learn the effective bidding tips and tricks, but once you get hold of it, it is a good way to make money. But never leave the place after you build a good reputation and earn some good feedback, even if you get jobs/clients outside these websites which would need your full time attention. Say for example, you get a client who pays you some good money but needs you during your whole available time. It is very likely that you will accept the offer and stop working at the websites from where you used to get freelance projects. But after a certain period of time, your contract with your private client ends and you have to get back to the freelancing websites. The time line of your absence of activity in the website could be long. Say, two or three years. During this time, there could be new service providers in these websites who have more feedback than you. You comes back, only to realize that you have been pushed to the backseat.

Worse, when you bid on new projects, the clients would suspect that you have either been disputed at the website, or you are not capable as much that you did not receive any projects during this time frame. You may try explaining to them, but most of them are not going to believe it until someone else awards you a latest project. So it becomes a nightmare for your freelance ambitions.

So what I would suggest for those online service providers is that you should not stop continuing your business activity in freelance websites even after you get a good private client. You should keep working out there so that it will help you during the troubled times. i.e. when you suddenly run out of clients. I learned it the hard way.

(Image source: Internet)

If you had thought Google’s is the best work place ever, check out the office space of Fog Creek (yes, the photo given above shows their coffee bar). It will make you drool. Joel Spolsky, the founder of Fog Creek says this in his blog: “Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted.”

Sounds cool? Now check out Joel’s blog to read about the features of his new office space and to see some pictures. You can also check out their Picasa photo stream here.

(Thanks to Nikhil for the link)

A few days back Lauella Amy from Indian Express interviewed me and they have featured me in an article about Podcast. The article was published in Expresso, Indian Express on 21/11/2008.

Thanks to Thulasi for sending me the scanned copy. (Click on the images to view larger version).

BarCamp Kerala’s 3rd chapter is to happen on December 7, 2008 at CUSAT Campus, Kochi (Exact location and maps will be up in the website soon). The organizers say that the exact time will be announced later. Go to their website to register and check out the list of attendees and sessions. A colleague of mine, Praseed Pai, will be taking a session on Programming Paradigms.

(Image courtesy: BarCampKerala.org)

Google continues to rock and the latest is that you can add themes to your Gmail page. You can choose from any of the available themes/skins and get rid of the boredom of seeing the same old page every day. I like the color based ones than the graphical themes and some of them are really good to read and makes it easy for the eyes. Check it out.

An article in gearlog.com says that Microsoft’s new technology SideSight could be a hard competition for Apple’s touch screen devices.

SideSight removes “touch” from the device and makes it a function of the paper, tabletop, or even the air that’s next to the device. What does this mean? According to Microsoft, it opens up the possibility for “touch” functions to be built into tiny devices that don’t actually need a touchscreen.

“Despite the flexibility of touchscreens, using such an input mode carries a number of tradeoffs,” the paper’s authors wrote. “For many mobile devices, e.g. wristwatches and music players, a touchscreen can be impractical because there simply isn’t enough screen real estate.”[...]

So what can you actually do with SideSight? Quite a bit, as it turns out. By twisting one’s hands appropriately on either side of the phone, objects could be rotated in place. Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page — a movement that would be akin to the motions a user’s hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.

(Link via email from Nikhil Nair)

In the latest top 10 listing (from June 2008) of super computers, India has made it to the 8th place.

For the second time, India placed a system in the top10. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved a performance of 132.8 Tflop/s which was sufficient for No. 8.

[Read more]

(Info via email from Ashik)