Certified in web services .... finally !

Well this was something that was long over due (if i believe myself well ... since 2005) the web services certification exam !

I finally managed to complete it - (bcoz my voucher was about to expire .... sshhhh !!)

But, now that I look back it was worth the effort and quite exhaustive in nature given the sheer breadth of the objectives. I think I should start an alternative blog which I can devote towards core tech articles as I have realized its better to categorize from scratch, something I did not manage to do with this blog.

Anyways, hopefully I should do that soon, but for the moment ... planning for a few more certifications

Browser's Chrome'd

Click to read

YASE (Yet Another Search Engine......)

Cuil (pronounced COOL) launched on 28th Jul '08 provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. It derives its name from an old Irish word for knowledge (co-founder and CEO, Tom Costello is from Drogheda, Ireland)

The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson.

Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM while Anna Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team.

Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects (google .. we need this !!), images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.

Some of the claims made by the Cuil Team:
1.] Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages
2.] Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity (..will be worth looking at this algo !)

Worth a look, but google replacement ??? ...i'm guessin not !!

The computer that cried "Wolf!"

Just an interesting article worth having a look at > The computer that cried "Wolf!"

Linking myself to technorati

Technorati Profile

Land of the Netizen ...

The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as an arithmetic engine.

The world of the Netizen was envisioned more than twenty five years ago by J.C.R. Licklider. Licklider brought to his leadership of the Department of Defense's ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) a vision of "the intergalactic computer network." Whenever he would speak from ARPA, he would mention this vision.

Today what we see is a radical shift & quantum leaps into the webi-fi-ed world. I still reminisce the days where I wanted to get that all so important email a/c and boast ... well, I have an email address !!

From emailing, to chatting, p2p ...., social-networking to blogging, I find myself in a different world !!

The reality finally hits in ....... 'home-run' - I live in cyberspace & there is no denying it.

Addiction is for drugs - if I coin the same term for net - addiction, I would be unfair to myself - its just normal. Spending 18 hrs on the computer is not a sickness & nor is it geeky. (I was amused by a review I saw on one of the news channels stating that, spending too much time on the internet terms you as a geek. Gosh NO !! If it ain't tech-constructive it ain't geeky ... no matter even if you spend you whole life online.)

Coming back to net-ville, ... so where are we running with all this information & connectivity crap hitting so blatantly in our faces ? I still remember the group discussion I had for my MBA entrance ... 'does IT help a person become a good manager?' & all started rumbling & arguing just for the sake of it. Bottom line was that information always existed even before our IT friends came along and wired everything up, just that it was not that accessible to us as it is today.

I feel Google has really transformed the way we look at and use the web. They have taken simplicity & jazzed it all up into one beautiful package - be it the google reader, sets, trends, code search, video, etc. Umm.. there is the jazzed up complexity also in the form of maps, docs, gears, apps & the likes. The reckoning of the cyber city is here ... the world of mash-ups, interconnecting pipes and all the plumbing that goes into it ...RIA has finally dawned upon us. The layman is ideally oblivious to such change - he will either ignore it, use it or abuse it.

But living here as a techie ... well seems that life is finally getting good !!!!!!

g.HO.ST ..... boo to the OS [its virtual]

In my previous post on why one should start using Firefox, I had mentioned the following, "... we hopefully will have some sorta virtual operating system in cyber space to which all we need to connect is JUST a browser (or s/w based on it)"

Well today I seem to have stumbled upon something headed well in the same direction. Enter Global Hosted Operating SysTem a.k.a. G.ho.st

G.ho.st Virtual Computer (VC) provides the first real alternative to Windows – a complete personal computing environment hosted on the Web and accessible from any browser.

An excerpt on things - from what they claim on their website,

1. Available from any browser in the world instead of being installed on one physical machine.
2. The operating system, many apps, and the first 3GB of data storage and 3GB of email storage are absolutely free.
3. Software (namely Web-based software) can be run without installation.
4. The computer is always up-to-date, secure and backed up with no action or cost on your part.
5. The G.ho.st VC manages all your Web logins and all your web 'stuff' (e.g. files on different web services).
6. Because it is online, the G.ho.st VC provides new possibilities for fun and collaboration, beyond what is available on a PC.

The applications you can currently run off your G.ho.st are

• Email & messengers
• Photo editing
• Scrapping text snippets, stickies,games, mp3, calculator, etc.
• Google docs (Edit word documents)
• Communication (Social networking and micro-blogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.)
• Internet radio,
• etc.

But an application worth mentioning is the Office suite provided on G.ho.st by Z.O.H.O Well Google docs is there too, which is cool in its own rights, but Zoho offers - a cool wysiwyg editor, options to share docs, post docs to [blogs, face-book, etc.], auto-saving, spell checks, tag clouds & exports to popular formats. Apart from this, they offer a plugin which integrates into your MS-Office products to save direct to Z.o.h.o & vice versa to keep your docs/sheets in sync.

There are a host of other apps you may want to checkout at Z.O.H.O which is worth looking at. Ironically, there is a post on tech-republic touting z.o.h.o to be the next Microsoft (apart frm apple, cisco, etc). This article and associated blogged discussion is worth a read.(click here for it)