Saturday, June 28, 2008

What the change you want?

Criticizing the Organization, becomes a routine for every one of us today :-). We do condemn/complain about many.We argue for a change in many things in the Organization.

Now,
Tell me, if you could change just one thing in your organization or team, what would it be? The options, I give you are,

* SIMPLICITY: Simplifying our processes, tools, and sphere of focus

* RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: Having better visibility of where our time and money are being used.

* ENGAGEMENT: Creating a more inclusive environment

* ALIGNMENT: Having greater visibility of alignment of culture, goals, and beliefs across all levels of the organization

* OTHER: If you find anything more than the above.

What's your option ?

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Nokia buys Symbian, Challenge to Android ???



Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system, just turned 10, but it won't see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about &euro264 million. In addition to purchasing Symbian, Nokia says it will be open-sourcing the Symbian operating system.

Symbian software is used in two-thirds of smartphones -- mobile handsets with computer-like capabilities -- but Apple Inc's iPhone or new categories of phones based on Google's Android software could challenge that dominance.

The move seems to clearly be in response to Google's Android initiative which similarly offers an open platform for upcoming mobile phones.I belive this may definetly make an impact on Google's Plan. Will it be an Android Killer?

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Blood Diamond (2006)


"Blood Diamond" - I'm sure lots of you have seen it or read about it, very long back itself. But now only, I got the opportunity to watch this wonderful movie thro’ HBO :-). Just thought of sharing my views on the movie….

Leonardo Dicaprio as Danny Archer, an professional diamond smuggler who joins with Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou). Vandy was separated from his family and forced to mine for diamonds. After discovering and hiding an exceptionally large diamond, everybody wants a grab him (so they can have the diamond) while he just wants to be reunited with his family. Vandy and Archer agree to help each other get what they're after but they need a little extra help and luckily for them Maddy Bowen(Jennifer Connelly)- a Journalist , who is investigating on the blood diamond industry and is able to get them access to things like helicopters and guns in exchange for the secrets behind the diamond smuggling Industry.

After so many hurdles, Archer unites Vandy and his son, who was abducted and forced into becoming a child soldier of a terrorist group; and he gets the hidden diamond from Vandy, in return. while rescuing Vandy's son, Archer got shot.Knowing that he is dying, he gives the diamond to Vandy and holds off the soldiers chasing them.Vandy and his son flee.Archer makes a final phone call to Bowen, asking her to help Vandy as a last favor and dying peacefully.

With the help of Bowen, Vandy trades the diamond to Simmons for a large sum of money and the reunification of his family, making the exchange as Vandy's wife and children deplane from a Lear Jet at a London airport. Bowen, who secretly photographs the deal, later publishes a magazine piece exposing the trade in "conflict" or "blood" diamonds.

The film ends with Solomon smiling at the photograph Bowen took of Archer earlier, now published in her magazine along with the complete story of their journey, before addressing a conference on blood diamonds in Kimberley, South Africa, describing his experiences. This refers to an actual meeting that took place in Kimberley in 2000 and led to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which seeks to certify the origin of diamonds in order to curb the trade in conflict diamonds.

Set against the backdrop of a Sierra Leone torn apart by civil war, it's a story aiming to depress viewers into never buying diamonds again. It's on the face of Djimon Hounsou, playing the role of a person whose life truly is effected by the events depicted in this film that we almost get that revelatory moment. The scenes between him and his son are really very powerful. I’m almost speechless at the end of the movie.

Blood Diamond, definitely one of the best films in my memory.

Google this:



How Close can NASA and Google get in?

The High-profile pair have now announced their ambitious plans to build 1.2 million square feet worth of office on 42.2 acres of land at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Google has signed a potential 90-year agreement starting at $3.66 million per year and will construct R&D facilities "in a campus-style setting." Naturally, the Googlers are already having fun promoting and publicizing the future R&D center.

Google's been on the right track, as in 2006, NASA and Google publicly announced the Space Act Agreement, a collaboration on projects involving availability of NASA data online, real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, and real-time tracking of the International Space Station.

You can check out overviews of the area in Google Maps and Google Earth formats at the main 'site.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=1182624&t=k&om=1"

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

What "Edit" ing can do ?

Amazing and unbelivable, what editing can do to a picture...

Before editing...

After editing the picture...

Wow, they are the same exact pictures!!!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Atom Vs ARM

Atom is a new architecture that offers Pentium M-class performance within a 2-W power envelope packed into a 25-mm2 die. These numbers are very small for an x86 processor, and they allow Atom to target embedded applications like mobile Internet devices where the x86 has not been used before.

If you believe the buzz, Atom is so good that it will displace ARM cores as king of the mobile world. Unfortunately, the buzz was extremely confused. Here's what the coverage got wrong, what it got right and what it completely missed.

Checkout the link below
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206901894&pgno=1

Monday, June 9, 2008

Mindmapping - A Project Management Tool

Mindmap - a graphical way to capture the words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to one another and arranged radially around a central key word or idea.

It is a wonderful tool to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. Anyone can use this tool for anything, which needs a thought process.

There are number of uses/ applications. but I can think of at least five uses:

1.Notes: to capture the objectives and Big picture of the project, during initiation stage
2.Planning: to define milestones, and track the progress of key elements
3.Innovating: to encourage creativity, to liberate the mind from linear thinking, allowing new ideas to flow
4.Problem solving: For brainstroming different solutions for the issues/requirements
5. Recalling: For capturing lessons learned throughout and after a project

You can try with some free Mindmapping tools. "FreeMind " is a good example.Checkout the link for more details/downloads http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Tiny Flash Drive from Intel


Intel launched its new tiny flash drive Z-P140 as part of the company's push to advance mobile Internet device technology. The Z-P140 SSD (Solid State Disk) is impressive, with a total area smaller than a fingertip (as pictured)

How tiny are they?
The Z-P140 measures 12 x 18 x 1.8 mm and weighs 0.6 grams - 400 times smaller and 75 times lighter than a 1.8″ hard disk drive. 12 mm is about half an inch.

What’s the Range?
The drives are available in 2, 4, 8 and 16 GB capacities. These are mainly aimed at the cellphones, media players, Eee-class notebooks… like.

2 part niche
Part of Intel’s pitch is size. The other is cost. They’ve priced the drives below where disk drives can go due to unavoidable hardware costs like heads and motors.

Pricing?
The pricing for 1,000 units available Q3 2008 for the 4GB is $25 and the 8GB part is $45. The 16GB will be available in Q4 2008. I suspect the later availability of the 16 GB part has more to do with getting prices below disk prices than manufacturing ability.

And the questions in my mind are,
• Will flash EVER replace disk?
-Are these flash drives pretty efficient than Disks, in terms of Power and Performance?
• Electronics giant Samsung has shown off what it claims is the world's most powerful and tiny chip. Toshiba announced its plans to use 30nm technology. Will Intel make a difference in the flash drive race?

Friday, June 6, 2008

Dasavatharam....


The June of last year, not only me, the whole world was filled with SIVAJI ecstasy, here comes another block buster DASAVATHARAM.

Start from the commencement of shooting, I’m very curious to watch this much hyped movie. I have decided to watch the movie on the first day itself. Though I’m not an ardent fan, the trailers and newsbits have really made me to heat up for the show.

I will be happy, if the movie can bring below items,

• Some level of importance to all the 10 characters of Kamal
• The reason, why kamal has to do all the 10 characters. Does the story really need this ? Or they are just made for fame?
• Crazy full dialogues
• Clear and simple story line

Even if it fails to impress as a movie, I’m sure that Kamal would certainly satisfy Tamil audiences to a great extent with his phenomenal performances in ten different roles. I hope both the actor and movie satisfy the audience and create a new history in World Cinema.

All the best to “Dasavatharam Team”.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

How do free software developers make money?

I have this question in mind for a very long time. How do free software developers make money to live? They spend a lot of time and effort on something that they'll never sell.

I feel, all Open Source developers are development lovers. Nobody forced them to code for free.. They're just looking for the honor of contributing on the Open Source community and of course they're trying to satisfy their need by coding a good piece of software. An Open Source developer is an unsatisfied user so he try to fix the code to satisfy his needs and share it with the community.

At this moment, I could remember one famous quote.

But…. Again the same question! How do free software developers make money to live?

Monday, June 2, 2008

Tamil Script – Evolution through the Ages

As My mother tongue and father tongue is Tamil :-), I always feel, Tamil very close to my heart. Whenever I find time, I used to read/write/think about the Tamil language and Tamil literatures.

Recently, I had a chance to read about the evolution of Tamil scripts. Here, I have attempted to present some of my experience.

The Tamil script consists of 12 vowels, 18 consonants and one special character, the aytam. The vowels and consonants combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247 characters.



It appears that Tamil evolved a writing system from the Brahmi script, circa 300 BC.Later, the Grantha script was employed in the writing of Tamil until the 8th century, when a distinctive script evolved exclusively for Tamil. Borrowings from Sanskrit added some special letters in Tamil which are still used.

Unlike most Indic scripts, the Tamil script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced plosives. Instead, plosives are articulated with voice or unvoiced depending on their position in a word.

Over two millennia, it has gone through many cycles of changes.It was really interesting to explore about the evolution history of Tamil language and Tamil script. Long live Tamil !!!