• Google’s official blog
• Watch the official Video here
• A potential boon to paid search marketers (www.searchengineland.com)

Well this was or may be the idea the social networking sites came into existence. I started with Orkut, then MySpace and now Facebook. Firstly I was amazed with the concept and features provided by these sites but now it has changed.

Wow !! was my reaction when I first logged into Orkut. Within few weeks I found it pretty cool that I have 500+ friends and I can keep contact with them forever. I can see what a friend is upto or can join various fans group, create my own group, plays games and the list can go on…. Daily in evening like a habit I will check my wall or any updates or watch some funny videos and spend time by updating my status and waiting for my friends reply or commenting on other walls.

OOOF !! I never realized that this habit has become an addiction and everyday when I get a free time I will login to these sites or keep on refreshing my page so that I can be first one to see other updates.

The networking site represents me as a “proxy” or my “clone” (let me use some technical words, feels good) on the internet. These days it has become a status symbol. I was completely surprised when my friend said “Kul, you have 500+ friends. You me be a popular guy “. Not only this , various companies are checking the profiles of candidate at these sites and trying to judge them before taking interview which I feel is questionable. Also I have been reading about the research done in this field to understand the behavior of users and various social networking models. That’s too much of work I believe.

But lately I realized that the amount of time I am spent on this had increased and my actual productivity towards other things has decreased. These sites don’t bring out anything good or make one an expert or be useful in any way. Also some of the best minds are working in developing these sites and keeping it active whereas that talent could be used to build something more meaningful.

I am not  against the social networking site but I guess these should be used for something more other than chat ,gossip, ’like this’ and upload photos.

Note: These are just my views and doesn’t intend to harm or hamper the images of social networking sites

Google brings Quake 2 to the browser with HTML5 – VentureBeat

Hands-on Review of Marvel Comics for iPad – BoingBoing

Rails 3.0: Second beta released – RubyOnRails.org

iPad apps go live in App Store - CNET news

Microsoft’s new strategy and gamble with FREE Office – CNET News

Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP – ReadWriteWeb

Chrysler to Build A Battery-Powered Electric Car by 2012 – Design News

39 Examples of Minimalist Web Designs – YouTheDesigner

Facebook jumped from its no.15 ranking last year to top the chart this time, while amazon jumped from no.9 to no.2.

Interestingly there is a link specific to most innovative Indian companies and the leader of this lot is the Indian Premier League.

In the Design section IDEO, my personal favorite, comes second to the BMW Group Designworks.

FiLife tops the charts in the finance section, First Solar leads the energy charts while Alstom leads the transportation rankings.

These are the Fast Company rankings but we would love to know which is the most innovative companies according to you?

The importance of this event lies in the fact that many of todays leading software companies use MapReduce based projects. It is slightly scary for these players especially the users of the Hadoop and the CouchDb projects (refer below for an introduction to these). Hadoop has been a quite popular open source implementation of the MapReduce framework and is used by Yahoo, Amazon, IBM, Facebook, Rackspace, Hulu, the New York Times and many other companies.

But as the article suggests its is very unlikely that Google will go after projects like Hadoop to enforce its patent as that could lead to a backlash (both from software companies and developers) that might be tough to handle.

Hadoop Jobs (source: developer.amazonwebservices.com)

For those who don’t know about Map Reduce, it a software framework introduced by google in a paper in 2004. As the paper specifies ”MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key“.

Google Code University has a lecture series here on Cluster Computing and MapReduce .

Hadoop is a free licence Apache project that  is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.

Quoting Wikipedia: It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data.  It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project. In 2008, Yahoo launched the world’s largest Hadoop production application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo Web search query.

CouchDB is another interesting Apache project. It is an open source database that is not relational. Instead of storing data in rows and columns, the database manages a collection of JSON documents. Basically it is a document database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API.

Email from Google

Also when opening Facebook from IE7 browser I got a box on the top suggesting me to upgrade to IE8. Earlier last year similar phase out warnings had started to appear on YouTube as well.

I am sure seeing this would have brought smiles to the faces of  many web developers, as writing JavaScript code to work on IE6 is one of the most painful things in front end web development. So many things just don’t work.

This move by Google and Facebook is very welcome. It will definitely help in  the growth of HTML 5 and advanced JavaScripting.

Some organization have long been running on IE6 and upgrading the browser is a big task for their IT departments. No wonder IE6 still commands as much as 20% of the browser market. It is only such actions on part of major websites, that can shake the organizations to make the shift.

One of the other reasons for phasing out IE6 is its security vulnerability. As this Zdnet blog points out, earlier last month Microsoft had admitted that the attack from China on Google and some other US companies had exploited a hole in IE6, which was also present in IE7 and IE8.

For sometime now, I have been wishing to have a cool device that could let me just browse the web and blog, while being portable enough to be brought out anywhere. I think i have found my device, now just need to wait for the 2 months to lay my hands on this new phenomenon.

The Apple iPad

Checkout Steve Jobs releasing the ipad here.
And checkout the images of the coolest devive in town here.

It is amazing as its a paradigm shift in the way we can code interactions with any GUI. It enables programming using GUI screenshots rather than lines of code.

As the article on MIT site says : A programmer using Sikuli doesn’t need to know anything about the code underlying a GUI. Infact even Sikuli doesn’t know anything about it, either. Instead, it uses computer vision algorithms to analyze what’s happening on-screen. “It’s a software agent that looks at the screen the way humans do.

Lets take the example of a weather map maintained by some Meteriological deparment, which specifies with a certain color (say dark gray) that it is going to rain in a particular region. A programmer using Sikuli can actually specify that a message should be sent to him mobile when the particular region changes to the rain colors. Instead of using language (as in terminology) to describe the color or the region, the programmer can simply plug screen shots into the script: when this (the region) becomes this color (the color of rain, dark gray), send me a text message. This is a hypothetical scenario i could think about similar to the bus example that is present on the Sikuli website.

Sekuli looks for the targets that receive the commands on the screen using a ‘computer vision engine’ that finds the best matching region. The script is based on Jython, a Python implementation on Java VM so you can use virtually any Python module with it. So there is a learning curve, but a basic understanding of Python is probably all that’s required.

You can watch a You Tube video demo of the language in action here.

The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API’s support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

Data Sources:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/screen-shots-0120.html

Tutorials :

Tutorials on the Sikuli site

Videos:

YouTube video : Script for automating a Coda/Firefox workflow

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OtmMKYhEjg]

YouTube video : Automatically setting IP on Mac OS X

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxDOlhysFcM]

YouTube video : Tracking a Panda on a webcam

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGC9AJqJUqA&feature=related]

Downloads:  Sikuli related downloads are available  here

The creators of the language say that it’s not intended for beginners, but it’s also not terribly difficult to learn. It’s object-oriented and boasts features like true closures and reflection.

This one is another resultant of the 20% time project time that Google is famous for.

Infoq has put together a primer for the language here.

Go’s own tutorial page is here.