I Joined Ness Technologies India

22nd December was the start of another life in my career as i joined Ness technologies India ,Bangalore center.I was working in wipro technologies for the past 3+ years and it was a very good experience with one of the pioneer IT services companies in India.In fact it was difficult to part ways and I had a good collection of friends there.But it is inevitable to have a change and being in a different environment is always challenging and thrilling experience for me. The past 3 years I learned the starting steps to survive in the IT industry and gave the confidence to take a different approach even in tough time. It was a warm welcome I received in Ness and I hope will be able to meet the expectations of the new company.

Semantic desktop

The term semantic web might be familiar to you.But what about semantic desktop? Semantic web is a term often used along with "Web 3.0" the next generation of intelligent or executable web as it usually referred by people.Semantic web is a concept introduced by Tim Berners-Lee the originator of the WWW.The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale not as linked pieces of textual information that can be understood only by a human as it is currently.Although a lot of research is going on supporting the semantic web concept and languages like RDF is been developed the idea of the semantic web has failed to materialise in large scale as there is little incentive to create semantic content when there are few services that use it.The idea of a semantic desktop originated from this realization.
Semantic desktop is aimed to help people find and structure information on their personal computers and share it with others in a network.This will act as a stepping stone to achieve the vision of semantic web.The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence coordinated a project called NEPOMUK(Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)to develop a comprehensive solutions for the semantic desktop concept.The Nepomuk software, which consists of independent applications and plug-ins for third-party programs, prompts users to annotate it and establish connections between different information items. this can be integrated in third party application like desktop environments ,browsers and IDEs as plugins. Nepomuk’s semantic annotating and tagging system has been incorporated into the K Desktop Environment 4 (KDE) and works are going on for creating eclipse plugins and integrations into firebox browsers also.Let us hope this will lead us to materialize the vision of Web 3.0 and semantic web.
References
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
Science Daily,Wikipedia-Semantic web,Info mesh,

Seven wonders of the web

It is interesting to listen to a lot of discussions happening in the web about the 7 wonders of the web.I think it all started when guardian UK published it's list of 7 wonders of the web in Dec 27 2001. Google and yahoo were obviosely in the top of the list and others in order are Project Gutenberg,Multimap,Ebay,Amazon and Blogger. Obviosely if you look at these made a profound influence in the internet world.But if you look at now ,do you feel something else is mising or has to come in the list. That is correct!.I don't think there will be any argument on including wikipedia in the list. The wayback machine,google earth ,social networking sites and many more can be in the list.You can see many suggestions floating around the seven wonders of the web ,but there is no uniformity of opinion. It is obvious considering the way web is evolving over the years and its true dianamic nature to make anything history within no time.A wonder today might not be part of history at all tomorrow.

Gamma on Design patterns

As a sequence to the previous post i thought it is worthwhile to point you towards a sequence of interviews with Erich Gamma the leader in Gof design patterns.It is allways interesting and informative to hear from the creator/originator. Refer to the wikipedia link on Gamma below which has the links to the interviews.
Reference
Wikipedia

Object Oriented Design principles

There is much hype about the design patterns in recent years and every one want to know design patterns or pretend to be experts in that. But most of them are not aware of the Object Oriented Design principles which are the base of any object oriented design. Design patterns provides a solution to most of the recurring design problems and basically does this by implementing good OO design principles. It is infact meaning less to go for design pattens before trying to understand the design principles. Design patterns basically leads you to apply good design priciples to solve your problem. These are the five basic design principles for object oriented class design .

1. The Single Responsibility Principle(SRP)-A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.
2. The Open Closed Principle (OCP)-You should be able to extend a classes behavior, without modifying it.
3. The Liskov Substitution Principle(LSP) -Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.
4. The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)-Depend on abstractions, not on concrete classes.
5. The Interface Segregation Principle(ISP) -Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

Apart from these there are 6 more principles about package cohesion and coupling betwean packages.Provided below some links in the reference section to learn more about them

Reference

Object mentor

OO Design principles

oodesign.com

ootips.org

Erdős number

I was just reading the news of stepping down of Stephan hawking from the Lucasian professor of Mathematics in Cambridge University.I also came to know that Hawking has a Erdos number of 4. This evoked my interest to know more about Paul Erdos the great Hungarian mathematician.

Paul Erdos ,an immensely prolific mathematician has wrote around 1,475 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly with co-authors. This made his colleagues to coin the term Erdos number which indicates the collaborative distance between a person and Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.Erdos has a number of 0 his co-authors has number of 1 and their co-authors will have number of 2 and so on.

The origin of this term won't be astonishing if you come to know more about Paul Erdos and his contributions .He stands only next to Euler in terms of the volume of mathematical work.Erdos also known to be of exceptional character for whom possessions meant nothing and spent most of his life as a vagabond.He has once told "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book".The Book is an imaginary book that Erdos believes in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems.See the wikipedia article and related links on Paul Erdos for more details.
Reference
Wikipedia

Top 15 technology start-ups

Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) honours Pioneer IT companies for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest caliber, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society. I just went through the list of companies and their innovative ideas and it is very surprising. I am listing some of them which i found very attractive to me.
1) Nivio
An indian company which is providing a vitual online desktops to users. This makes computing as easy and affordable as a Cable TV subscription.User have to purchase a monitor ,keyboard and mouse and a connecting device which substitues CPU. The difference is data is stored in the internet in a virtual environment.
2) Spinvox
SpinVox captures spoken messages and cleverly converts them into text. It then delivers your message to a destination of your choice – inbox, blog, wall or space.
3) Slide
Slide lets you use photos and other digital content to publish and make a slide shows and vedios.The company's widgets include slideshows, guestbook’s, SkinFlix, and FunPix. It also operates along with Facebook and Myspace.
4) Mint
Online free personal finance service. This helps users to automatically track and analyse their financial transactions, set budgets, and even send balance updates in text messages to cell phones.Only thing you need to do is register anonymously using a valid email address and give your account details. Mint automatically gets the account details analyze it and provide the details required.

See the kind of ideas which is transformed to better business solutions. You can see the complete list of 15 companies in the reference link.All are bright innovative ideas. One interesting thing you can notice is that young minds are behind most of these innovations.
Reference
Times of india