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He who seeks truth shall find beauty

He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification

He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow being will find the joy of self expression

He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature

Through nature and the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek truth
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

-From TED Talk by Moshe Safdie: What makes a building unique?

Bio & Links to his buildings in the talk

Comfort of feeling safe with a person

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out,

just as they are — chaff and grain together — certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,

keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

-George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

Wisdom and Enlightenment

Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self requires strength.

-Tao Te Ching, Translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

New Paradigms for Full Engagement

Old Paradigm                         New Paradigm
Manage time                            Manage energy
Avoid stress                             Seek stress
Life is a marathon                    Life is a series of sprints
Downtime is wasted time       Downtime is productive time
Rewards fuel performance       Purpose fuels performance
Self-discipline rules                 Rituals rules

-The book, The Power of Full Engagement, page 6.

Photo of Golden Temple, Amritsar India courtesy voobie on Flickr.

The links are to Wikipedia Design Pattern pages which I liked over the Portland pattern repository for overview:

• Factory pattern: Any method which creates an objects, initializes it and returns it. socket.getInputStream(), Executors.newFixedThreadPool(), Collections.singleton(), etc

• Iterator pattern: Used to traverse collections. Collection.getIterator()

• Decorator pattern: Use to wrap\convert Streams adding functionality to them. Not Adapter pattern due to added functionality. Wrap a FileInputStream into a Reader and use .readLine() to read lines.

• Chain-of-responsibility pattern: The streams as above, the Streams chained handle the request and pass it after operating on it. Criteria, an alternative to HQL in Hibernate.

• Strategy pattern: Concrete strategies to implement family of algorithms which are interchangeable. All collections are strategies, accessible using a common interface, depending what what is stored, Map interface can be HashMap, TreeMap, LinkedHashMap

• Template method pattern: Define the skeleton of an algorithm in an operation, deferring some steps to subclasses. java.util.AbstractCollection expects iterator, size, add and provides addAll, clear, contains, containsAll, isEmpty, remove, etc.

• Singleton pattern: Java Security Manager, System.getSecurityManager(); Socket accept and other permissions

• Prototype pattern: Has a Cloneable marker interface, which indicates to Object.clone() that it is legal\safe to make a field copy. Should not be done for open files, self-allocated memory, ….

• Observer pattern: Built in support in JDK including Observer interface & Observable classes.

There are many more such as Thread pool pattern, Inversion of control which forms the basis of Spring framework and so on.

I would like to see the following ones this year.

These ideas were triggered from my own search fora proposal and have some link to my own background of a Web services backend engineer on Linux.

On Grid Programming

• Real life MapReduce examples using Apache Hadoop with Java & Streaming API

This would cover pseudo and real code for actual real life examples for Map Reduce, going beyond what is there at the end of the Google Map Reduce white paper. These would be projects powered by Apache Hadoop.

• Tour of Facebook\Apache Thrift

This would cover different aspects including serialization across same language, data transfer using their transport API & across different languages

• HDFS setup and access from Java\Rails

This would be for those considering using it as a DFS without Map Reduce. Leo touched on the topic in the blog entry, Rearchitecting Twitter

General Programming

• Java web frameworks and how they fit in together?

Unlike say Rails, Java has a wide array of web frameworks, see Wikipedia’s list in Java enterprise platform category. It might make sense to highlight a few like Raible did earlier, Comparing JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts 2, Tapestry and Wicket, however showing different ones as used in the Terracota Exam App.

• Python libraries and packages you were not aware of

The title says it all.

• Becoming a better Python Programmer

Something beyond the coding standards and idioms in the PEPs.

Desktop & Tools

• Linux desktop applications you might not know about
  

Again the title says it all, for example, for me, this would cover Amarok for playing music files, TakeNote or Tuxcards for outline note taking, Freemind for mind mapping and more, this would begin where the Linux Journal Readers‘ Choice Awards 2008 end.

• Top Open Source Personal productivity tools

The title says it all

• Best Open Source Developer Tools

This is a tricky one and would require multiple programmers to come up with a complete list, a Kernel programmer would be happy using vi\emacs, while a Java one would use Eclipse or Netbeans and so on.

If you are interested in presenting these, do consider making a proposal at the OSCON 2009 Call for Participation. The last date is Feb 3rd 2009.

Presenters get a free pass to the regular conference.

Number of Job openings as per Craigslist:

• Java: 352
• C++: 113
• Python: 114
• PHP: 371
• Rails: 48
• C#: 88
• Perl: 180

Observations:

The above comparision has some bias including the fact that Perl & Python are regarded as Scripting language and only in some case get a job on their own, unlike say Rails or Java.

Right now Craigslist is the best Job search website for Tech Jobs in the bay area

Average Salaries from Indeed.com:

Observations:

Rails & PHP average salaries are about 5% lower than all others and they drop further if paired with Developer instead of Engineer.

I picked Mountain View, CA which has a fair share of different companies and the radius will pick up San Jose, Redwood city, etc.

Nation-wide Salary Trends from Indeed.com:

Observations:

The top four programming languages are PHP, Java, Perl & Rails. Caveat, Due to the fact that indeed.com searches other job sites, the duplicate posting rate might be high, however it would apply to all postings.

For a different view on the same topic, see my earlier blog post, Top Programming Languages as derived from book sales and TIOBE Programming Community index.

I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out.

I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle.

I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life — where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management — with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not.

The complete letter at Daily Brief blog at portfolio.com.

The summary of the book, it asks the reader to keep things simple and divide all incoming money into three categories, the Expenses into Must Haves & Wants. The remaining is Savings.

Must Haves are those expenses, you would not stop even if you did not have a job for an year or two, like Basic food, House, Fuel, etc. Rest are all Wants such as TV, Restaurants, etc.
Over long periods, particularly years, keep the above in following percentages:

Must Haves 50%, Wants 30% & Savings 20%

Within a few days of this, we had tracked our expenses and broadly knew more about our expenditure then we ever did.

The book has suggestions on how to bring the Pie back in balance. Beyond that it covers many other areas such as house purchase, etc.

More information:

Two of the book’s chapter are available from the official All your worth website: The Truth about Money and Financial CPR

It’s All Your Money blog has a detailed review of the book: Balanced Money Formula. He has shared a spreadsheet in the review that allows tracking money and follows the balanced money formula from All your worth.
The Simple Dollar blog also has a detailed review of the book: Review: All Your Worth

For you:
Finally, this book might not be the right Personal Finance book for you, depending on your spending habits, earnings, age, savings, etc.

Simple Dollar blog has an article with some suggestions in This Is the Right Personal Finance Book for You!

   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.

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.

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.

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.

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.