My iPhone

I got a new iPhone. Though its been a month now, but i thought i will post it here anyway. Its an awesome piece of device. Functionally my windows mobile does everything what the iPhone does. But the difference is the way iPhone does it. Yes..Its all about the user experience with the iPhone which i am really enjoying.

Agile Methods course - University of Oxford

Tomorrow i am going for the "Agile Methods" module to Oxford university. I have been working feverishly to finish my pre-assignment which is a presentation on "Scrum on a large distributed team". After doing lot of study on scrum in last 2 weeks, i have really started appreciating this practice. Though in my current project we are following scrum(daily stand up meetings, release backlog and usage of wiki for task tracking), but what i have learned in my last week of study has truly been an eye opener. More details to come from tomorrow
Next post from oxford..........

How will i prepare for my dream MBA?

I am planning to apply to the MBA schools in Fall 2009. Thats gives me roughly 18 months to prepare. I have to plan every step to the minutest detail and got to feel good that it is the right time to apply.

My preparation will involve:

1) GMAT.
2) Essays preparation.
3) Geeting the right recommenders.
4) Top notch experience including leadership.
5) Successfull completion of Oxford University degree.

I am back after a 3 month gap

Its been a long time since i last blogged. Its been a strange and absolutely wonderful time from Nov to Jan 2008 end. A lot happened during this time, some was good some was ok.. I have some sweet memories.
But now after three months of letting myself loose, i am back in business. I will blogging much more regularly from now on.

FogBugz based on Event Bsed Scheduling

Fog Creek is currently demo-ing their new bug/task tracking system FogBugz.

Most of the systems which we currently see (for example Jira, Bug tracker) are based on the fact that they are good at reporting, maintaining and tracking (somewhat) bugs and tasks. That's it. The role of a bug/task tracker system usually ends there. (if you been making more use of a bug tracking/task management system, drop me an email).

There is where FogBugz is different from rest of the systems. Probably the most interesting part of FogBugz is Evidence-Based Scheduling, which uses a statistical technique called bootstrapping (a variation on Monte Carlo) to determine the probability that you'll ship on any given date. In short, this is how it works. You estimate features as usual. But then, instead of adding up all the developers estimates—instead of taking them on faith—FogBugz does a Monte Carlo simulation looking at what speeds developers worked at in the past, vis-à-vis their estimates.

In Joel's words:
Using that same distribution of probabilities that we had in the past and if we run a simulation of 60 futures each of which will occur with equal probability, what we get, instead of a date, is a probability distribution curve that shows the probability that the product will ship on such-and-such a date.

Now thats what i call an awesome sfotware tool, which really stands out. Well how reliable and accurate FogBugz is, is another question.

I think i got to try it to find out!!!

Facebook Developer Garage London October 2007

Ever wondered how you could create the next mega app for Facebook. Do you know what FBML is? Well i will tell you that. It is "Facebook Markup Language".

"Get wise and monetise"....This is the title for the upcoming Facebook developer Garage event in London on 24th October 2007.

I will be there and you should be there too!!!!

Network with other developers and entrepreneurs to create the next mega hit application. Your audience is the 40 million users on the world's most exciting web platform.

Speakers will include:

* Affiliate Window - Monetising Facebook Applications Through Affiliate Marketing (David Hall)* Paypal (Anthony Hicks) - How to take payments (and subscriptions) with Paypal for your Facebook App.
* M&C Saatchi (Speaker TBC) - Online advertising in the UKIn addition there will be two application showcases from garage developers.

You can get your tickets here:
http://londongarageoct07.eventbrite.com/

Sapient to enter in Interactive media space in India

In London and NA we have been making rapid strides in the Interactive Media market for quite soem time, now its India's turn!!!

Our studios will synergise real-time work: Sandeep Dhar- Interviews-Opinion-The Economic Times

Silverlight video

Just got this off of Glenn Block's blog. Scott Hansleman posted a Silverlight video of Scott Guthrie demonstrating MVC to ALT.NET Crowd. See it here.

Orcas

I tried Orcas (new version of visual studio) over the weekend. I really like the new interface. Though the interface is not drastically different, but its sleek look on Vista is awesome. Feature wise, there are quite a few, but one feature which i liked a lot is the ability to multi target. As i heard from scott guthrie, Orcas is the first version of Visual Studio that enables developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means that you can open or create a project that explicitly targets either the .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 releases, and Visual Studio will automatically filter intellisense, toolbox controls, and add reference dialog items (among other things) to only show those features supported within that specific version of the framework.

Then there are good C# features such as automatic property generation. So from now we do not need to write both private memebers and thier public properties. The compiler can automatically generate this for you!!!!!

Another feature which i ahvent tried much but read about is the object and collection initializers. Though i felt that isn't an Object Initializer already present in the language in the form of a constructor? I dont know yet, will have to dig deep to find out whats going on inside.

Credit Crunch - Will this lead to recession?

Northern Rock the UK's fifth-largest mortgage lender, has asked The Bank of England to provide emergency financial support. This has made the Newcastle-based firm the highest-profile UK victim of the global credit crunch, triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. But the question is how many more to come? Following the widespread losses made by investors in loans to US homebuyers with poor credit history, the so-called sub-prime loans, banks and investors who have had their fingers burned have become wary of buying any mortgage debt.

As financial times stated: “When the patient is in seizure and the extremities are starting to turn blue it is not the time to worry about the patient’s longer-term dietary plans or about undesirable side-effects of the current treatment. Yet I fear this is what central banks will do. The next set of steps had better be convincing and decisive, otherwise a much wider financial implosion and economic recession will become very likely.”

How will it affect the jobs in the city? Will we see a slowdown? Lets wait and watch

Artificail Intelligence - Machines taking over?

Continuing from m earlier discussion about Artifical Intelligence, i found the following from one fo the technology writers who went to the Singularity Summit

Singularity Institute Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky explained over the weekend at the Singularity Summit why many believe that machines will eventually be smarter than their makers. The stunning progress in packing more computation power onto silicon chips, married with software designers’ increasing ability to take advantage of this power, virtually guarantees that machines are progressing faster than humans are. One day, machines will start building themselves, he predicted. And at that point, humans will certainly no longer be the smartest creatures in the room.

All that conference goers could agree on is that life with machines won't be the same. And even if the machines that take over from the geeks are friendly, these new masters of the universe may not serve pinot noir.

Artificial Intelligence - Where are we heading to?

Recently the Singularity Summit was held in San Francisco and it was attended by record number of people.

I had been reading quite a lot on the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence recently. The singularity institue exists to confront the new world of Artificial Intelligence, both the opportunity and the risk. I have been interested in this field since 2003, when i took a module on AI in my Computer Science degree and thus have my own views to share.

Do you think the machines can take over mankind someday? - Well currently i cant imagine something like that. However i can imagine computers taking over most of our jobs. People worry about competing for jobs with people from Mexico or from China, but what about competing with computers for jobs? People will be friends with robots who tend to understand them better than other humans!!! It will be robots who will make decisions as to when are we supposed to sleep, when are we supposed to eat and what are we supposed to like. Now that seems scary right. I think in 20 -25 years time we might also have the first Human-Robot relationship(partners/marriage). In short, robots will be good enough to replace humans for almost everything.


Robots are already to the level of rather dumb/stupid pets. Given moore's law, they will be to the level of smart pets within three to five years... That much is just simple exploitation of systems that have already been developed... This is such deep stuff, and there is so much of it that it will really take a human+ intelligence to fully use the data that we have now, much less the data that we will generate before we are able to create that human+ intelligence.

Increase in spam in gmail

In the last few weeks or so, I've noticed a marked increase in the number of spam emails that are making it into my Gmail. All are filtered to the spam folder though, but I still dont like it as the number has gone up sharply.

I used to get maximum of 3 to 4 spam mails in my spam folder in a week. However nowadays i receive 15-20 spam emails everyday. I dont know what is the reason behind this sudden increase or if others are also facing this situation recently. I tried searching on the internet but no related events have been reported by anybody.

One possible reason could be the fact that i registered on facebook around the same time and then suddenly i noticed the increase in spam. Is it something related to facebook? Are spammers getting hold of my email address from facebook? I wont be surprised actually as i have already started receiving job adverts/mails from agencies through facebook!!!

Let me know if anybody else faces the same situation.

Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival - Bricklane

Today i went to the Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival at bricklane. I had heard so much about bricklane, but never been there. So i othught it was a good chance to go there.

I tried the Singapore's unofficial national dish (crabs!!! - you would have guessed by now), as well as other regional specialities such as Hainanese chicken rice, char kway teow and laksa.

You could even get henna tattoos there, watch Chinese dragon dancing and browse market stalls at this event organised by the Singapore Tourism Board.

Morveover walking around bricklane made me feel that it was quite similar to Camden Market. There were artists, musicians and lots of junk stuff being sold and bought. It was a nice expereince to see another aspect of life and ponder over it.

Still thinking about it actually.....

Sharapova's US Open wardrobe is inspired by New York's skyline

For 2007 U.S. Open Sharapova is wearing tennis dresses decorated with graphic interpretations of the cityscape on the chest.

The dress is a sleek garment made of a breathable wicking jersey and constructed with a no-sew technique with seams bonded with heat and silicone instead of thread.
There are more than 600 Swarovski crystals incorporated into the design, adding a little flash to the outfit, but Sharapova said it's simple and classy, which suits her taste. "I don't like things with too much pattern ... things that are tacky.''
There also are three crystal buttons down the back, creating a keyhole effect.

No thats a quality dress i reckon. By the way she is through to the third round as well.

Behave# and NSpec - Behaviour Driven Development

I found something new today. I was reading casper's blog and came across Behave# and NSpec.

Behave# is a framework for defining and executing application requirement goals. These characterizations are modeled after the Behavioral Driven Design (BDD) terms Story, Scenario, Given, When, Then.

Behaviour Driven Development, or BDD, represents the evolution of current coding practices with respect to Test Driven Development (TDD).

One of the good points of behave# is that that if you want to specify Exceptions as part of your story, this forces you to move away from [ExpectedException]. Which is a Good Thing anyway.
It is quite verbose, although the verbose-ness is one of the qualities that could make it attractive to product owners or PMs. The code is really to express acceptance tests rather than developer-focused 'unit' tests. (Have a look of Behave# code example on casper's blog)

I think i am going to try a real world example and see how it goes or to put it more appropriately to see if it grows on me and how comfortable i feel.

Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications Book

Today evening, i borrowed the book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications from a friend of mine. While iwas in the train heading home, i started reading the first chapter which is so meaningful in a programmers day to day life. The content of the book is very well organized and the flow of writing is just too good. It is a must read book.

On the first of page of first chapter i came across a few lines which really made me think how appropriate and improtant this book is for a progammer.

Quoting form the book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications:

"Debugging is also a part of software development that's famous for causing you to pull all-nighters. I'hv yet to run into an engineer who has called his or her partner to say, Honey, I can't come home because we're having so much fun doing our UML daigrams that we want to pull an all-nighter! However, I'hv run into plenty of engineers who have called their partner with the lament, Honey, I can't come home because we've run inot a whopper of a bug"

Well, I am sure any programmer (I mean a real programmer) would agree with this. Let me know what you all think

Google's gPhone

I have been hearing about Google's gPhone for over six months now but it was mostly speculation and hype by somebody on his blog or some avid google follower who thinks google is not only working on a gPhone, but also on an Operating System, a revolutionary gComputer and etc. etc.. list goes on.

However, the on again, off again offering to the mobile world by the search giant is reaching fanatical levels of hype and thanks to a recent news story by Rediff News in India, the hype is only getting worse. The story published by Rediff said that the gPhone is two weeks away from launch!!!! Now that is some serious speculation. Sources close to the development said a simultaneous launch across the US and Europe and India is expected, and announcements would be sent to media firms in India and other parts of the world in a week.

Well but all this is still simply a rumor, but a good one nevertheless. Lets wait and watch if google makes an official announcement. If they come out with a gPhone by any chance i am definitely going to get my hands on it asap, as i just love the way they make software.

Opps...aren't we talknig about hardware too over here!!!

.NET Stock Trader Application

Microsoft has created a sample online stock trading application to demo the securities industry that its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and .NET technologies can be used for high-performance applications within a service-oriented architecture. The application also offers full interoperability with J2EE and IBM Websphere sample application.

I am working as a Technology Consultant in capital markets domain and have noticed that microsoft technologies are still not popular and not the first choice as development tools for trading applications. However i think this sample application might open a few doors and show people the power and flexibilty of microsoft technologies.

The .NET stock trader application uses:

• Service-oriented, n-tier design with ASP.NET and WCF.
• NET 3.0 with Windows Communication Foundation.
• .NET Enterprise Application Server Technologies.

Check it out here: .NET Stock Trader App

YouTube role grows as U.S. election nears

Candidate Forum on You Tube


Democratic U.S. presidential candidates (L-R) Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Maurice Gravel, William Richardson, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden take part in a candidates forum at the NAACP annual convention in Detroit, Michigan July 12, 2007. YouTube members are uploading video questions for upcoming CNN/YouTube debates.By yesterday evening, more than 1,700 videos had been put on YouTube's site for tnights debate among Democratic candidates. Now thats what i call Technology influencing Mankind.......or lets say influencing politics