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June 10, 2009
Here’s my feeble attempt at painting. I usually emote with textually or vocally… it is unusual for me to express stuff visually. I named it “anguish by moonlight”… to express a temporary moment of helplessness.
I used the “brushes” iPhone application to do this. By far the best painting application for the iPhone.
This has been released under the Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 License. Do whatever you please with it under the conditions of that license.
Filed under: Personal |
Comments (5)
June 6, 2009
Twenty20 has injected the Cricket world with hope that it may, someday, overtake Baseball as the number one bat-ball sport on the planet. It’s a good format - concentrating a great game into a series of tasting courses makes it a whole lot more palatable to the “they play for five days only to draw?” crowd.
It should be no surprise to anyone following the tournament that the Dutch went ahead and knocked over England. The Ashes seem to be front and center for England - and the decision to rest Kevin Pietersen’s sore achilles showed it. Without Flintoff and Pietersen, this England team is incapable of finishing explosively… Key is wasted down the order and where the hell is Dmitry? Daft team composition.
Anyways… India were imperious against Pakistan during the warm-up. That was just as good as a game gets for the batting side… chasing a decent total, fervent crowd… crushed them. Although you wouldn’t put it past Pakistan that they were sand bagging all the way. They have an odd way of sizing up circumstances and rising to them (Misbah-ul-Haq, the honorary Indian, excluded).
My favorites for the 2009 T20 World Cup?
West Indies, South Africa & India
West Indies have a superb team almost custom designed for this format. They’ve been sand bagging through their England tour in silent protest and I have a feeling they are going to show up during this tournament. Not having Dwayne Smith is a dumb move though. But Edwards, Bravo, Gayle and Taylor make this a fun team to watch.
South Africa - if they open with Kallis, get Morne Morkel in groove and find some big hitting in the lower order to partner with Albie Morkel - they are a very, very strong team. The fielding is excellent as usual… and AB de Villiers is just amazing…
India’s bowling is not settled. I would have taken Nehra over RP Singh. I don’t give a damn about the purple cap he won at the IPL… RP is just not quick enough so shut-down top notch openers who are in the zone. Nehra may have taken fewer wickets, but he earned them… he is a bit quicker, more experienced, hungrier and gets more bounce when needed. If not Nehra, then Munaf Patel would be on my team sheet. Ishant seems to be getting his groove back. Harbhajan is superb… Ojha might make a good duet with him.
India’s batting though… puts it ahead of the rest in this contest. The defending champions have the best batting line-up on Earth. And that’s with Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid cooling their heals. Rohit Sharma continues to amaze. The kid has otherworldly batspeed. Gambhir is solid. Sehwag needs to lift himself. Dhoni is himself. Raina can shred anybody he damn well pleases. Yusuf Pathan is a power house at the bottom and his brother Irfan is a very under-rated batsmen as well.
Dark Horses:
Pakistan, New Zealand and Australia
Pakistan because they are Pakistan. Anything can happen with Natsikap.
New Zealand have a solid unit… they haven’t ever lost to India, and Ryder hasn’t even fired yet. If they had Bond they’d be in the favorites camp.
Australia is a solid unit. They are too nerdy for my taste. They don’t excite me. With Andrew Symonds gone, they are dead for me. I will not support teams that put in ridiculous “don’t have a beer in public” clauses to player contracts and then enforce them. Symonds is special, let the guy do his thing… Australia have become too mechanical. I keep wishing South Africa wouldn’t have stepped off the gas and handed Australia the series earlier in the year. That was annoying. SA are the best test side on Earth, India a close second.
Based on how well the veterans did in the IPL, I think the T20 World Cup should field an “honors international” team…
I would have:
Steve Tikolo
Brian Lara
Glenn McGrath
Shane Warne
Anil Kumble
Graeme Hick
Mark Ramprakash
Chaminda Vaas
Adam Gilchrist
Rahul Dravid
Sachin Tendulkar
Kumble or Gilchrist can captain it… don’t care.
Would make a pretty good team, let’s call them the “Wily Foxes”. Prolly take out England, Bangladesh and Pakistan if Natsikap turns up… bonus points if they dunk nerdy Australia.
Cheers, may the best team win!
Filed under: Cricket |
Comments (3)
May 31, 2009
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with market economies released its annual labor statistics report recently.
There’s some interesting data derived by Forbes from the report which would have been actionable except that these statistics are for 2007. That’s right, in mid-2009, we are getting data for 2007. Nuts. The world is a GOOD BIT DIFFERENT don’t you think?
I’ll be waiting for next year’s 2008 report with bated breath. Wake up OECD, this is the real-time web and it needs actionable data.
Filed under: Innovation |
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May 29, 2009
Around the first quarter of 2008 I got interested in comet-enabled applications because of the richness and immediacy they deliver to the increasingly real-time web. The list of use-cases I could envision leveraging comet for in the world of ECM / BPM were endless - that just made the research all the more worthwhile.
Back in March, one of the languages and frameworks that made comet enablement really simple was Scala and Lift. Back then, they were on version 0.7 and I had emacs going and getting the hang of the Lift. Jorge Ortiz, a Scala-Lift expert, had an excellent sample application called LinkShare on the Scala blog which I extended with some of my own customizations.
LinkShare leverages Lift’s CometActor trait which is an extension of Scala’s Actor trait to perform the magic of having your links show up in near real-time on other browsers and vice-versa. This example was a powerful glimpse into the web browser’s role for content-centric collaboration. While the ideas kept exploding in my head, there was just no bandwidth for me or my team to possibly make a credible attempt at building out a collaborative platform using Scala-Lift at the core.
After the Google Wave Early Developer Preview video I saw today. I am glad we didn’t. If this doesn’t keep the SharePoint team awake at night, along with the IE9 team - then nothing will. Predictably, it was a buggy demonstration - but that comes with the jagged edge that they are playing on.
Even with two years worth of development and the relative simplification HTML5 brings to ‘cometifying’ your application via Web Sockets and the years worth of AJAX experience the team had with Google Maps AND the enormous cache of operational knowledge they have with XMPP (GTalk) - they still haven’t cracked it fully.
What they have done though is shown how powerful the browser can be and how much room for improvement exists in the content collaboration space. I also love the fact that they have built a context-aware spellchecker leveraging their massive cache of indexed web content. Spelly is a living example of “great content creates great systems”. Yeah ok I plugged my book ;).
The other area of encouragement is that this is a 3/4 Google product - which is usually a success indicator @ Google. Google generally executes on 2/4 aspects and loses the plot for stuff like Knol. The four aspects being APIs / Technology / Product / Execution. Google Search is APIs + Technology + Execution. You can’t say product because it really does one thing exceedingly well and doesn’t have the bells and whistles of a Cuil or a Bing. And that’s fine with me.
Wave delivers on APIs / Technology / Product - but the verdict is still out on execution. For this to “win”, it needs to be able to get deployed on private clouds and it needs to get buy in within government agencies at the Federal / State / Local level. If Google is going to expect all Wave shared objects/content to be deployed within their public cloud infrastructure - the impact it can have will be dampened due to data privacy and control issues from enterprises.
It’s nice that Tom and Alice can add photos to the same album simultaneously and see their changes occur in near real-time. But it is nicer to be able to jointly draft a contract scope document, fire off an intra-tweet to my Laconica instance and kick off the next step in my highly optimized collaboration WaveFlow. I want to hold business conversations with Wave and that means I want private or atleast bordered infrastructure.
And yes - I know a ton of other products do live collaborative editing and authoring of documents - that’s NOT what makes Google Wave unique! It’s the seamless interplay of a variety of components, the excellent potential of the extension, embedded and robot APIs that make it compelling.
I look forward to Wave maturing into a beta release later in the year - they are onto something, here’s to hoping they execute the right strategy!
Filed under: BPM, ECM, Innovation |
Comments (3)
May 9, 2009
The ImageWork team was having dinner @ Acqua last night and we spotted Zachary Quinto - who plays Spock in the new Star Trek film at the place. When we hailed him with the usual “live long and prosper” line, he was very personable and humble, taking time to answer all our questions.
Took time to take some pictures, but my lame-ass iPhone camera with no flash could only manage this in the dark:
I saw Star Trek on the first day of its release, and J.J. Abhrams did a great job with everything but the soundtrack. All in all - it’s a great boost for the franchise and I won’t be surprised if this is going to be an $80M opening weekend at the box office.
UPDATE: Star Trek made $76.5 million over the Thursday to Sunday period. A record for the franchise.
Filed under: Unexpected |
Comments (0)
May 7, 2009
Back when I started at ImageWork in 2001, all I really had were strong technical fundamentals and confidence. The beauty of growing up in a small company is that it is much akin to deep frying <insert your food of choice here> - you get immersed into high pressure situations and it is sink or swim from there.
At ImageWork’s deep fat fryer, Gee Yip was the benchmark people measured themselves against. No matter who I spoke with, Gee was highly regarded for his spirit, his skills and most importantly - his dedication. As an impressionable 19 year old, I was lucky enough to work with him on a few gigs and it is an experience I will always cherish. After all, what good are fire hoses of knowledge without thirsty people?
A classic Gee-ism was a Kofax Ascent Capture solution demo we did for a customer up in Albany. Me and Gee toiled hard for 2 days to get the demo “just right” - one proven, the other eager to impress. Sure enough the demo went great! The customer was happy and interested - and all the buttons I clicked worked! Once the customer left the conference room, we proceeded to pack-up our workstations and scanners, strapped it to the trolley. Yours truly however was still high from the demo’s success and happened to miss a power cord still stuck in the extension slot… Gee reminded me about it, and I went over and got it out and quickly tried to shove it into the first available slot in the trolley…
“Zubin! No - wrap that cord up neatly and put a band around it so it stays together!” said Gee exclaimed. Sure enough I did as I was told… but I did feel a bit offended that of all the things that could be said at that time - this cord was the focus. I never understood it then. But after 8 years, I definitely understand it now.
The intent had nothing to do with the cord - and more to do with the work ethic, dedication and attention to detail it took to be who he was. It’s a lesson I deliver, with interest, to my colleagues today. If you have high standards and demand less than that from others - you are doing a disservice to yourself, them and the organization you serve.
I never interacted too long with Gee, he left a few years after my joining - but he was always there for me; always mentoring, always sharing and always encouraging experimentation and education. Those aspects didn’t need years to appreciate.
At 10.30pm, May 5th 2009, Gee Yip passed away. To the father, the husband, the leader, the ImageWorker and friend - Rest in Peace and God Bless You.
Filed under: Unexpected |
Comments (8)
April 20, 2009
The day the IBM-Sun talks disintegrated after weeks of deliberation, I knew something was up in Oracle land.
The same day over dinner, I told my fiancee, Kelly, that Larry Ellison probably called Charles Phillips from his yacht off the coast of Japan and told him to buy Sun. To me, it just made total sense.
Why build DB appliances with HP when you can have Thumper? Why go crazy with cloud RnD when you can have Sun hardware engineers and their Blackbox container data centers?
Why bother with ‘Oracle Linux” when you have Solaris, ZFS and DTrace?
Why adapt to Sun/JCP standardization efforts when your entire Fusion stack depends on it? Why not have the most threatening DB to Oracle - MySQL - in your grasp? Not that controlling InnoDB didn’t already achieve that :).
Excellent work by the Larry, Charles and Safra team again. What Oracle doesn’t have or hasn’t clearly identified in the public eye yet - is the person implementing the vision? Who is responsible for putting these pieces together, informing channel partners and system integrators on what technologies go where?
They have two BPM engines, two app servers, two databases, two OSes, Coherence, BerkeleyDB, two IDEs and now JSF2.0/ADF… I am sure there are people already working on this, but the over-arching vision is not clear currently. Communication is going to be everything in the next six months.
Filed under: BPM, ECM, Innovation, Professional, SOA |
Comments (5)
April 14, 2009
In the upcoming 2009 General Elections, most of the political front-runners are not representative of India’s population. In a nutshell, they are old and disconnected with the global populace. Ignorance is bliss! Age bestows a sense of entitlement to some of them.
This is not to disparage their age - but more their reluctance to learn and embrace change. For every Manmohan Singh, we have a Mamta Banerjee.
India has an incredibly young population - with a median age of 24.9 - and 100 million children under the age of six. That is 1 child for every 3 people in the United States. In the next two decades, this is the population that will shape India’s image in the global populace.
For example, Dehli’s Members of Parliament range from a 39-72 years of age. Not exactly a snapshot of India. So bottom line - if you are young, and of voting age - get out there and do what it takes to make your vote count.
One of the most common excuses is “Who do I even vote for?”:
Well, good news! Google India setup an Election portal for us to figure out who is in the running and other key stats. Having a strong young voter base (<40) is in the interest of the country and of those six year olds growing up - make a difference now and maybe they’ll vote for you one day!
Filed under: India, Personal |
Comments (2)
March 31, 2009
danah boyd - is just cool. I follow her work closely because her research is applicable to the world we live in today and one I am intimately familiar with.
However, I have to disagree with her recent post requesting a rubber-meets-the-road coder that realizes her streams of consciousness. Not because it is a bad idea - she probably will achieve decent success with it, but because it is the wrong chain of command. Assuming she does have powers vested in her to assemble resources where the count > 1… she really needs a distiller.
Distillers, are an intermediary between a highly creative personality and the coder(s). They are especially adept at grasping the personality’s frequently ephemeral thoughts and subjecting them to a reality check. They are good at that because they were coders once. They understand what is in the realm of possibility, but most importantly, they can add nuance and color to the personality’s thought process.
I understand that danah just wishes to build constrained happy-path prototypes, but she does mention a whole host of technologies. This means you are going to get a swiss army knife - adept at a lot of things, but brilliant at none. Distillers give you a degree of abstraction. They solidify the vision, and nullify your dependency on specific skills or resources.
From my experience, good distillers are the difference between success and failure. Idea factories struggle for traction without these mediums, and coders are rudderless. Maybe danah will listen, regardless, I wish her the best.
Filed under: Innovation, Professional |
Comments (0)
March 27, 2009
This is really cool. Really. Good on them Russians to do this and pay the candidates well.
Unfortunately, there is one fundamental problem with this experiment. Namely, an inaccurate representation of psychological state.
1) I am on land. I know that when I stepped into this experiment. I know that, barring one of the other members attempting to kill me, I am going to be safe. The probabilities of something going wrong over a 6-month trip to Mars are significantly higher than this experiment purports it to be. I’d be a whole lot more anxious on a real journey to Mars.
2) I know I can “get out” when I damn well please. That is clearly not an option when it comes to a real journey. Again, knowing that, just makes you a whole lot calmer.
So yeah, this is a ‘humane’ simulation. But accurate it is not.
Filed under: Innovation |
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