The Google Story does not end here

A six letter world is all it requires to change the Internet. No guesses, its Google!

Google has become an unchallenged standard in its own. Even strong players like Microsoft are helpless but to put in futile effort to capture the web search-engine market.

Starting with search-engine, Google has expanded into many arenas over years. Like recently, it has entered the mobile OS world with Android. Lets count what Google has added into its portfolio in a few years:

Gmail – Fast like lightning, giving new meaning to mail applications

GTalk – What a breakthrough was it when GTalk was integrated with Gmail window.

Maps – Started off with Google Earth, then matured to online version of Maps. This has been in controversy over security. Now, cities are getting added to the Steet View feature.

Etc, Etc, Etc…

Strategic acquisitions of services like YouTube, Kaltix(that’s what we know now as iGoogle), Picassa, Feed Burner, etc has helped Google expand its product base. However, we can now see that Google will foray into a lot of acquisitions for mobile applications and advertising as future apps will demand that technology.

Recently, it has come out of its beta-clinging and released a version of Google Chrome – ‘A browser built for speed, stability and security’ (in the words of Google.) A release was necessary as corporate won’t touch something that is always under development and does not have stability. This will help IT sector to build more apps supporting the browser.

Google SMS is also something very useful. What more, it has been launched in India long ago. So 9773300000 on mobile stands for Google!

Google Apps and code.google.com are a boon for developers. Google Gears seems to be something promising.

Get a hand on ‘The Google Story’ for interesting reading.

Web Development v/s Web Usability

I just read a book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. The tagline of the book is – A common sense approach to web usability.
The book is very interesting and the author has pointed out how web-designers/developers often overlook certain simple yet important web-usage patterns while designing a web page.
The author has discussed several usability traits that we need to keep in mind while designing web pages; like users mostly don’t read pages, they just scan/skim them.
Steve has also provided the Acid-test for good site design:
1) What site is this? [Site Id]
2) What page I am on? [Page name]
3) What are the major sections of this site? [Sections]
4) What are my options at this level? [Local navigation]
5) Where am I in the scheme of things? [‘You are here’ indicators]
6) How can I search?
If the page is well designed, you should be able to answer these questions without hesitation.
The book is merely a 3 hr read and you can just browse through it. Its full of illustrations and examples so it wont bore.

Wanna learn Java / J2EE

A friend has pointed a very good site for learning Java development (from scratch or just another level).

Its fully loaded and even a high-school student can learn Java by using the tutorials on this site.
My first take was that the official Sun Java Tutorial is the best resource for learning the language. But, when I just skimmed thru the contents, within minutes I was convinced that this one is damn good and better than the official tutorial.

The site is http://www.javapassion.com/
It covers a wide spectrum of Java Technologies – from Core Java to Struts ; from Advanced Java programming to Java Server Faces and web-services.
The training guide uses NetBeans IDE which I don’t prefer much. However, once you get some hands-on exercises on NetBeans, you can switch over to Eclipse IDE (look out for Jboss Eclipse IDE for web-development)

One more site that I would like to mention here is http://www.java2s.com/. This site contains a lot of useful and reusable code snippets not only for java, but also for many other programming languages and even sql queries.

At present in the industry, a standard requisite for someone who wants to call himself/herself a Java developer is to know J2EE along with some frameworks like
Struts Spring Hibernate (for database access)

Password Management

Most of us might have faced situations when we are unable to remember the damn password that we gave. Stuck! Not now, after you read this 

Choosing passwords is very important as it should be hack-safe. For eg, if you use your (or your girl/boy friend’s) name as the password, it can be easily guessed or hacked as many tools use name-dictionaries along with common dictionary words as a feed to break the password.

To keep everything in control, just follow a few easy steps:
Choose a base for the password. Any word or a combination of words of 8-24 characters is idle. For example, let me choose ‘raresouls’ (rare souls) as a base for my password.

Next, replace the alphabets with similar looking number – like – replace I by 1; S by 5; O by 0; B by 8 and so on (use a bit of imagination/phonetic alphabets here).
After applying this, my password becomes ‘r9re504l5’. Let me call it final-base and this one seems to be damn strong.

Again, using the same password everywhere is a risk and using different passwords is not convenient. So, how do we solve this problem?

Just add a prefix and suffix to the final-base for every account you give the password.
For eg, suppose I was to use my password for a Gmail account, I would give ‘gmr9re504l5ail’ (to break up final-base - final-base between gmail - here its like gm-r9re504l5-ail ).

Have a rule about giving prefix and suffix. Like say, for prefix, give first 2 characters of the site-name and for suffix, next 3 characters following prefix.

That’s all!!

Not all Minds Work in the same Way

We often get many ideas in and around our mind all days. We share some; we discard some, while some we keep it to ourselves.

Ideas and thoughts are things that should not be kept in vacuum, they should spread and be discussed freely. In this space, I will share my ideas and thoughts and you are also welcome to do the same - Sharing is Surviving - we can help and construct something innovative and out-of-the-box by maybe, forming a community.

I was thinking of developing a plug-in for Microsoft Word. A few days back, I wanted to take printout of a single page of word doc, but not in usual manner. I wanted the print to be split into 2x2 pages i.e. 4 pages. I searched the internet for any plug-in or so, but there was none available. For this, I might have to use CorelDraw or something similar, but I thought that doing it with MS-Word would be great. I call it ‘Doc Slicer’. Lets see, if I get some time, I will try something by downloading development tools for Ms-Office from Microsoft site.

Lets share our ideas and thoughts, filter them, enhance them and mature them through this space. After all, not all minds work in the same way!!

Whats BPM

BPM - Business Process Mgmt - is the practice in which I am currently working. Often a big enterprise has various divisions / departments which use different IT solutions built upon different platforms and packages as per the demand.

But, at some point, there is a need to integrate these solutions in order to optimize business. This is where BPM comes in.

I wont go in details to explain the basic work-flow methodologies and life-cycle mgmt of the practice. Just go thru this link for more information.

For the current project, we are using Savvion Business Manager as the development tool. It is a very powerful and well-known tool in the BPM space, but to learn using Savvion is a bit tough - implementing any new functionality is like a challenge.

Although intial days were tough, I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed it.