I guess almost everybody likes Google Doddles.
Wont it be good, if users can create doddles for important dates in their life. For e,g,if a teenager has got his first kiss on a day, he can create a doddle of that. Whenever that date comes in future, that will be displayed. You can also doddle the day you got your first pay, took your girl friend for dinner, or day you gave a memorable gift for your parents, day you trekked to a wonderful spot with friends, day when your daddy gave you a bike etc..
Why i feel it will be good? Reason being that there are many small wonderful moments which makes life wonderful. Due course of time we forget that. Having something like this will make people happy. When somebody is in a depressed mood, seeing such things will give them confidence, and cheer up them.
I am thinking of writing a service that could do this. Any thoughts, leave your comments?
While developping MyCity Traffic app as mentioned here, i needed a database to store the data. I ruled out GAE because its No-SQL structure doesnot support me and Google Cloud SQL was not released then. I chose Amazon RDS then. DB i selected was oracle. The pricing for both Oracle and MySQL were almost same.
Agree that Amazon RDS gave lot of features and you can play around a lot. It would have suited my needs well if the app was widely used. It turns out that number of users for this app was very limitied and i did not find justification for the high price (around 100USD a month)i was paying for DB. At the same time i did not want to shut down my app completely as i want to keep using the app and improving it.
One day i realized that one of the domain i was using had some extra capacity and it had a MySQL db as well. So i tired experiementing with it. I created seperate schema in the MySQL environment and open up the DB for connection from remote IP’s.
So now my java webservices hosted on Amazon EC2 is talking to MySQL db hosted in another domain. Webservices are invoked by my android app. I just need to add couple of security aspects over it and you are safe. So my alternative for Amazon RDS is much less expensive (just the hosting charge per year). ofcourse i wont get the benefits RDS gives like scalability, replication,backup etc, but for my app in
life support, this is just enough. May be that this is the default option for many folks and i had a oversite and chose a wrong
sfotware. Life is about making mistakes and learning.
After moving to Chennai on 2010, i woke up to the reality of cost of education in India, especially in metros.
Also discussion and life of a factory manager in a erstwhile Apple computers manufacturing facility mentioned here left a big impression on me.
In India, education is one sector where competition does not bring down the cost of product. Rather every provider right from school to college increases their fees. The worrying factor is that it is not a reasonable increase. The cost of my college education is the annual fee for a primary school children.
Coming to the point, what will be the future implications of such high cost
1) As parents spend more on education, their savings become less.
2) As the cost of college education inreases beyond affordable level, people will either forced to take loan
or give up studying.
3) If people take up loan and spend a lot, they expect the job to give reasonable salary. After 20 years nobody will be able to gurantee how the pay will be as the work force will become more globalized.
4) People will end up working just to pay for their loans. That might kill their entreprenurial spirit the risk taking age profile 20-30 years
5) If people does not pay loan, they end up being bankrupt and so will be the banks.
6) If lot of people does not join college there will be scarcity of people in middle management or waged job which require skills in tasks woth average complexity.
Though i dont think goverment can support all forms and all stages of education, current state is not sustainable. Goverment can employ teachers in contractual positions and at the same time improve quality of schools.
Retired people can be used for teaching(if they are willing) in villages where there is lack of teachers.
Any other thoughts?
As a part of one of my plans, i started exploring e-commerce platforms.
Surprised to find lot of Out of box e-com platforms which already have lot of features.
So this time, i am just going to customize and most of my work i guess will be on real business side.
Given that i have worked on them for just two days, i could be missing lot of points.
Feel free to add if you know any. I have evaluated CS-Cart multi vendor version and Magento free version.
Continue reading →
2011 was an almost good year for me. Though the results were negligible, entire set of events happened in 2011 made me happy.
Key few thigns happened for me in 2011
1) I resigned from RBS and took a 3 months break. Developed andorid application for real time traffic monitoring. I was able to get some insides on Android,GAE,AWS and Restlet.
2) Joined CTS as an architect.
3) Learnt French and completed two levels.
What am i to do in 2012
1) Learn Python and Scala.
2) Implement few more of my ideas and market them better.
3) On personal front reduce weight and improve my concentration duration.
Posted in Life
|
Tagged 2011
|
I like XPath and happy with the DOM, SAX etc. When i was working on a project which gets data from different coarse grained web services(using JAX-WS), it was pain iterating through bulk of data response and getting only the object instance that matches my need.
I thought of using XQuery, but i had some limitations. So we ended up doing the logic in code.
WOnt it be good if we have some XML processor or JAX-WS response processor written in a JVM language. Wont that give better performance than conventional xml processors? Any java application that uses them can also give better performance.
This striked me when i was learning Scala. But then i realised that a JVM language will be a best fit than scala.
What do you think? Will this be a useful one?
Why is that browsers are not communicating or sharing info between them?
Wont it be better if i access a URL in a browser in my cell phone, and decide to share
the url with a browser in my PC/Mac running in my desk.
The browser in my PC can again re-load or can just re-use the same content generated by browser in cellphone.?
Wont it be great if i can share bookmarks between them without going via exisitng bookmarking solutions which stores info in internet.?
Wont it be great if i could store a section of HTMl in cellphone for quick reference while the main page is in my PC.?
I kinda want a protocol which would facilitate inter device browser communication.
Yes, google has finally given( almost) the most awaited feature in its cloud portfolio. It has opened up entries for limited preview of its Cloud SQL to developers. Now MYSQL db will available over cloud. Obviously it will be available only for Google App engine applications developed in Java or Python. Though GAE currently has bigtable, its no-sql datastore, using that for applications requiring SQL db was tough.
For me its a big news because i need not pay $115 per month for amazon RDS. I am not sure what will be the pricing of Google SQL cloud, but i beleive it will be competitive in the industry.
Action starts now.
Sometime back, for my website i struggeled a lot to create sharp buttons (like the ones you see in Google or Google analytics). I downloaded free image editing softwares, worked with layers etc and spent lot of time.
Last week, when working a sales presentation, i realized that beautiful sharp buttons can be created from Powerpoint.
This is how i did
1. In a slide create a shape from selecting it in Insert==>Shapes
2. Right click on the shape and choose format shape. You can use gradient to give varying shades or solid fill. You can apply 3D effects as well.
3. You can edit text and apply shape and special formatting for that as well.
4.Once done select the shape, right click and “save as picture” as to a particular destination and format of image(PNG or JPEG). The image can be used in presentations.
5. You can also try features like one image over other, play with transparency and create special effects.
The created images can be used in websites or other presentation. The main benefit is that we need not worry about CSS formatting of native HTML laebl and text box to get similar effect.
On the downside, in web pages, if you use HTML element, the size will adjust with screen size. However image will not. You might need to set image properties appropriately while using in HTML.
As i was thinking over future plans of book-a-friend as mentioned Here, i realized that i should concentrate my efforts towards service end rather than web based user interface. Why? Because i feel that down the line, after 5 years usage of browsers will become less. Whats the reasoning?
1. Lot of casual users prefer tablets over laptop and desktop for daily activities. After 5 years, laptop or desktop might be mostly used only by technical people. Percentage of casual users using browser will decrease.
2. Most enterprises develop apps for interacting with customers so that they can be used either in tablet or smart phones.
3. Honestly app interface is less troublesome for developers than web interface. No need to bother about alignements , box size, users using refresh or sneeky stuff. Time to debug and fix an user interafce issue takes a lot of time which can be channeled towards implementing better business usecases.
Checkpoint
What might actually work in favour of browsers is the presence of multiple OS for tablets and smartphones. With browser apps, you code once and the potential customers list is limitless. WHile in case of apps, it is limited.
For now i will gotowards developing andorid platform interface for book-a-friend. See you with updates
P.S : Howmuch ever you automate stuff, people embrace an app that gives instant results.
