Entries from October 2008
With big players and enterprises looking up at cloud computing and with salesforce.com taking the lead for on demand applications, can Microsoft be far behind.
At the recently concluded PDC 2008 , MS launched Microsoft Azure ; a host of on demand services.
In fact not in the true sense of cloud computing, Microsoft had started the project codenamed Hailstorm. Initially called .NET My Services it was supposed to be a framework to build applications upon. However for some reason it did not make its mark.
With various changes in the internet shelf of Microsoft, like introduction of Live Services, Skydrive, Office Workspace it was soon becoming ominous that MS shall be launching a new framework for the developer community to embrace.
Microsoft Azure looks all set for cloud computing and even has a SDK/tools which integrate with Visual Studio 2008 ; so developers can code in C# , and other .NET languages.
Some related resources can also be found in the Azure MSDN site.
Categories: New Computing Strategies
Tagged: .NET, Cloud Computing, Force.com, Hailstorm, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Visual Studio, On demand services, PDC 2008, Professional Developer Conference, Ray Ozzie, SaaS, Salesforce, Salesforce.com, Windows Azure
Today I was playing with the WordPress posts and widgets , and I found it has LOTS to offer. One of the reasons of staying at blogger, was that I could add widgets by adding Java/HTML scripts. I thought I could acheive that only in WordPress.com by buying some credits … but today I found the solution.
While playing with the widgets I found a widget called Text ; with a description saying for HTML . I thought for a moment ; and then burned my WordPress blog feed in feed burner; and pasted the code …. and it was working neat.
So some of my doubts with WordPress are over, even though editing CSS still remains paid. Now I am waiting to hit up my next post.
Categories: General
Tagged: HTML, Wordpress.com
Could not think of a better post name – the post name is one of the greatest hits of The Clash.
I have started blogging on my blogger blog for quite some time . Blogger has given me the liberty to add various scripts and widgets to my blog – thus letting me change my blog theme now and then and adding widgets for the better. My blog currently has a PR of 3 and I think blogger has still lots to offer.
A couple of days back I also enabled podcast for my blog, well things are fine with blogger. But for a couple of days I am getting the feeling that starting of a wordpress blog would be better. In fact I started this blog around two years back , but what kept me away from continuing at WordPress was the fact that I could not edit scripts, neither could I customize it. So I was there posting here with some general stuff, and giving my favourite blog much attention. So as a beginner to blogs, Blogger was amazing…. well it still is. Well so far so good; an amazing experience, fun, lots of widgets – cool stuff ; overall an excellent platform for bloggers to start on.
One of the things which was holding me blogging at WordPress is the lack of professional themes. Well a couple of days back I found this theme – it was professional, elegant and had the best look from all of the featured themes. I am also starting to realize the basics for a professional blog – comments,feeds, useful widgets – and WordPress offers all of those – adding a few more widgets like online presence,music player would be nice – takes the boring times away.
I guess WordPress has everything, and with the acquistion of Intense Debate, comments are likely to get more interesting. I also have Intense Debate in my blog; but I guess with WordPress 2.7 rollout, things shall become better.
Just feeling nostalgic, should I stay at Blogger, or should I go to WordPress – even though somewhere WordPress is peeping the post.
Categories: General
Tagged: Blogger, Intense Debate, My New Blog, Professional Blogger, Wordpress
Echoing on one of my last posts , I had mentioned that Surface computing has a lot to do with the retail industry .
I had given an example about a cafe shop using surface computing and SaaS, but also mentioned that it can be extended to the retail sectors, eg the hotel industry .
So the next time you check into a hotel , you don’t have to wait for someone to guide you through – may it be the hotel itself, or flip through the menu cards . Software can take care of that – in fact surface computing finds one of its market in there.
Sheraton and Microsoft has just done that – Microsoft Surface at play in Sheraton – taking away the pain of the long cues and other stuff .
Somehow , whatever I am thinking or putting into my blog post is coming out real in some way or the other.
Let me see when people in India shall realize the potential of surface computing. The economy has gone north and this is one of the best time to show case the potential to the clients and get some business.
Related articles
Categories: Computing · Software Architecture
Tagged: Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Surface, Multi-touch, Sheraton, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Surface, surface computing
October 23, 2008 · 1 Comment
A couple of weeks back I had attended a Yahoo Big Thinker seminar. The topic name was “Six Degrees of Separation – The Science of a connected age, and the speaker was Duncan Watts. The agenda was the same as in other seminars, so I was curious enough about the presentation.
On registration we were handed over a goodie, ( mine was a USB Led ) and the seminar kit. As I chatted with my friends there over coffee , I did not have any idea what exactly the speech was on. After the tea, we all sat inside the ball room waiting for the seminar to start off. There were some slides being shown, about Yahoo, and I continued to watch them.
Soon the speaker , Duncan Watts had arrived. He started his speech on the small world theory. He was an amazing speaker, and was very crisp and clean in the entire presentation.
He had addressed one question, that “it is difficult to get a doormans job in New York”. That is because the person who brings in the doorman should be trustworthy.
This statement opened up some interesting questions on semantic search in the Q & A session. How does a web agent validate the trustworthiness of the person.
I guess LinkedIn tries to acheive this by asking the user several questions, when the user requests to add a contact. But it is not fool proof , supposing the user ( A ) knows something about the requested contact ( B ) ; then A has several ways to access B – first he can send a request ; and lets say B accepts the request then A and B are contacts – so this not a fool proof idea either.
I did not get any specific answer in the seminar, what I got was this kind of stuff needs to revisited and someone should come up with a design … so you see thats a long way to go.
Categories: Research
Tagged: Duncan J. Watts, Duncan Watts, Intelligent Networks, LinkedIn, Research, Six Degrees of Separation, Six Degrees of Seperation, Social network, Social Networking
There have been various incidents in my family, which has resulted in various forms of medical ailment .
For example, my uncle who was doing pretty fine, did a routine heart check up and found out that 85% of one artery was blocked . He went on for a block removal .
Problem Statement
So the next time I go to a doctor, he can not only tell me about the present scenario , he can also predict what can be the suggested outcome … well they normally do, based on experience .. the more experienced he is the better option he can give ; so the keyword here is experience .
Earlier we visited the ophthalmologist for spectacles, and he would do a manual testing to give the correct lens. But now it has been replaced by computers , and no matter how less experienced is he the computer gives the correct lens , and the doc does some fine tuning on top of that .
Predictive Analysis/Analytics and Software Architecture
As business develops for the better and health care options get expensive, can’t we embed business intelligence ( BI ) into our daily lives.
So the above can be replaced with a more general option; say a computerized prediction… a option from which everyone can benefit .
Building this BI requires knowledge / experience on data mining built on that particular domain. This sort of BI has come to be known as predictive analysis.
A health care system, developed keeping predictive analysis in mind can go a long way in helping the common man in his/her daily life .
More details on predictive analysis/predictive analytics can be found here .
Related articles
Categories: Software Architecture
Tagged: Business intelligence, Computer, Data mining, Health care, predictive analysis, predictive analytics
