If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

The Builders by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

   So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is t he best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

Noted from the audio version of “Surely You are joking Mr. Feynman” by Richard P. Feynman, copied from this Russian website.

10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

12. Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.

15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.

19. A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

43. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

100. We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.
And immediately I made my peace with the fact that my career field is here to stay.

117. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

I gave Wordle this blog’s titles till date, finetuned a few setting and voila, a visualization of what the general focus of last 2-3 years of my writing\blogging has been about.

You can click on the above image for a large version

The Java applet with the above data
I would not get to use the Unicode “non-breaking space” character, so silicon and valley show up as two words above.
It is created by Jonathan Feinberg, who works at the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group at IBM Research.

Thanks to Ned for pointing Wordle out.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

-Winston Churchill

Doing Things

We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.

-Southwest airlines CEO Herb Kelleher

Keep pounding

Most people are going to tell you to give up, to just be normal, to quit being a dreamer. I want you to never listen to any of them and keep pounding away at your vision.

-Greg Prow, VC at Mobius

A way to arrive at your grave
The object of life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, Holy shit, what a ride!!!

-Mavis Leyrer, age 83.
The above quotes are from the book, My startup life by Ben Casnocha.

I first got a glimpse of it when I watched the documentary, The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED It was a great experience, and I learnt about many things outside my current world.

So this year when the TED 2008 was going on, I attended a virtual TED conference of my own, watching speeches from previous TED conference.

Here are the Top Presentation Videos from TED, The Life and World Conference:

• Ben Saunders: Three things to know before you ski to the North Pole

To explore the limits of our potential. The title says it all, he did it solo.

• Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Very practical, loved it. Few worth noting, let kids dismantle appliances and learn to handle fire

• Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

Insights and experiments into synthetic happiness(being happy with what you get) and how it is same as real happiness. Too many choices will reduce your chances at synthesized happiness.

• Burt Rutan: Entrepreneurs are the future of space flight

On why Joy is defendable and what inspiration for kids changes a field.

• Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

Outstanding visualization of changing status of developing countries like India over the previous five decades.

• Majora Carter: Greening the ghetto

On a project to create a park in New York.

• Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce

Why there is no perfect spaghetti sauce and what it teaches us about creating products

• Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication

Making things

• Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design

The idea for new form of interacting with computers that we see in the iPhone.

• Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos on what Internet industry is like the Electrical one.

• Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

When creating something, when working for somebody, target it at people(customers) who care and it just might take off.

• Jonathan Harris: The Web’s secret stories

Projects on datamining and visualizing people interacting on the Web

• Rives: “If I controlled the Internet” (a poem)

A humorous poem

• Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Motivation talk. Some points. Seek to create and thereby get to achievement. Then up the ante and do it faster, better. Grow or stagnant. Use uncertainity to stay out of boredom.

• Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

Using the human brain’s prediction methods for computing

• Roy Gould, Curtis Wong: WorldWide Telescope

A telescope controlled by anyone.

• Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

Ideas such as Freedom, Capitalism, Religion are Memes. Memes are viruses, spreading, affecting everyone, changing the world, killing scores of people.

• Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?

An architect and his buildings including Exploration Place, Wichita, Kansas, Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel and Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, Anandpur, India

• Ray Kurzweil: How technology’s accelerating power will transform us

On how technology grows at a increasing rate.

• YouTube - Frozen Grand Central

Do watch a few which call out to you.

Green are growing market share, Bold are of interest to me.
It is fair to point out, this is just one publisher, book sales are more forward looking, it is what those in the software development field are learning and they do not cover topics learnt using online resources.

Top Programming Languages as per TIOBE Programming Community index

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings.

Green are growing market share, Bold are of interest to me.

Late Jan 2008, I went ahead and attended the Yahoo ToastMasters club in Sunnyvale, called Yapsters as guest. It was definitely worthwhile and I became a member and have delivered my first speech.
It is obviously about public speaking, however it is useful in many ways:

• The core approach is to do a series of 10 speeches with each focusing on a certain aspect of speaking (Speech organization, Body language including eye contact, Vocal variety)

• You will automatically find your own areas which need focus, be it planning for a speech, english language, fear of being in front of an audience.

• There are stories to hear and things to learn from other’s speeches. I enjoyed one about the Mexico desert where the stars touch the ground at the horizon and look forward to others.

• You become part of a highly motivated and ambitious group.

• There is a leadership track with 10 activities, which you choose to go on that instead of or in addition to the public speaking track.

I would recommend it and am glad I added it to my todo list when Steve Pavlina mentioned it in his blog. It has become one of the things I look forward to.
If you would like to find a club near you, please use the following link: http://www.toastmasters.org/find/default.asp

Some snippets with minor grammer changes for continuity:

Ideas:

First insight, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known;

Controlled Passion:

Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways.

Radical Constraints:

One mental trick is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

Loves Frustration:

For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software.

The changes include a bug fix and removing some confusing features including note auto-encrypt.
This is my first Open Source release after joining Yahoo, which means it has gone through the official approval process.

me2u.yahoo.com allows you to create a greeting or any message as an ad and send it to a yahoo.com user (sorry no international users rights now.)
They will see the ad on any *.yahoo.com page when they login next.

If it is displayed and not ‘viewed’ (incase it was missed), they get an email mentioning it and it will be displayed again a few times.

Pretty nifty stuff!

Advertising can be useful information about products and services we actually want. The advertisements we see should be helpful and interesting, not annoying and irrelevant.

I use to believe in that and have skipped\avoided ads due to the noise there is. But working in Advertising field in someways (I am in a Software Engineer Yahoo Display Advertising department), I came to believe, another thing, that sometimes Consumers might not know what they want or might try out, this includes a new cereal, a new updated car model, a new serial coming up, until they learn about it and try it out. To re-quote,

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted faster horses. Henry T. Ford, inventor and entrepreneur.

So, there is a balance between desire and needs and another angle is creating awareness.

Greg is right on about Personalized advertising. If you are interested, take a look at the Targeting options, Yahoo provides, specifically Yahoo! Behavioral Targeting or BT as we call it, which has been in place for a while now.

Personalizing advertising — targeting to advertising to individual interests — can make advertisements relevant, useful, and helpful. By learning from what each person likes and does not like, personalized advertising can use that fleeting glimpse of our attention to show us something we actually might need.

Disclaimer: The blog entries and opinions mentioned in this blog are my own personal viewpoints and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.

It really did help prepare me for a more mindful yoga practice: it usually takes me 20-30 minutes to shake off what I call the “debris of life” (all the to-do lists, internal dialog and white noise that go on in my head) and surrender to my practice; this time around, I eased into almost immediately.

My own experience when I do Pranayama is that it is better to do it after Yoga Asanas, particularly since I do the Asanas only one or two times a week. The Asanas open up the body, making the Pranayama more fulfilling.

Moreso, in Yoga Sutras by Patanjali (Wikipedia link, Book by Iyengar, Book by Cope), Pranayama comes after Asanas so it is kind of a next step.
Talking of Pranayama, the best book I found is Yoga for Transformation: Ancient Teachings and Practices for Healing the Body, Mind, and Heart by Gary Kraftsow of Vini Yoga.

Real innovation is what I refer to as “inventing left-hand columns.” What I mean by this is that once users hear what is now possible, they not only realize they must have it … they now consider it a requirement.

…

Buyers use this matrix to evaluate market offerings … thus the more unique features, you offer the more the X’s appear in your in your column … and this is a good thing.

New left-hand columns cause users to start asking everyone else for such capabilities.

In my experience and observation, it almost always is not a good strategy to focus on features. This is specially accurate for startups. Features in search of a product is a case often encountered in the Technology field.

When a startup or team focus on features, the customer anyways buys from their original vendor or the number one vendor,  all they do is request your features from them. And a claim of the feature as upcoming, even a year or two from now is enough to halt evaluating the startup’s products.

It has happened many times including Microsoft Active Directory with Administration Delegation (I was with Entevo then)

The key then is to solve an actual customer pain or provide a functionality never available before.

She and her boyfriend, Wan Hsi Yuan, 27, run the business, 8coupons.com, from their 500-square-foot studio apartment, meaning headquarters is, effectively, their couch. The business, which text messages discounts to users’ mobile phones, keeps Yuan and Ung, who is 28, up until 3 a.m. most nights. Then, Ung said, she sometimes finds herself lying awake, worrying.

“I need to watch a little National Geographic special on the rain forest or something before I go to sleep,” she said.

…

Welcome startup life in 2007.

…

“The Aeron chair is out, the Starbucks latte is in,” Shipley said.

…

“We don’t go out anymore,” Yuan said. “For the past two years, all we do is work.”

…

At home, they sleep in a queen bed and their workspace/living area is roughly the size of a king bed. They have Internet-only cable; their flat-screen TV shows their Web site, and Yuan works from the couch on an arrangement of pillows they call “his shrine,” typing braces on both wrists, a serving tray with a wireless keyboard on a pillow on his lap.

…

At the startup camp, a partner at a venture capital firm ran through a PowerPoint slideshow on what VCs are looking for: Companies doing things competitors can’t with technology that’s either patented or incredibly challenging to create.

As he went on, it was clear 8coupons lacked nearly every attribute he listed, but Ung and Yuan shrugged that off.

Ironically enough, it is people who work long hours specially need Ergonomic Furniture like Aeron or Soma Biocomfort chair to avoid long term pain.