Vishal Kothari

I have recently been learning Perl just out of curiosity. The first script that I am writing is to traverse recursively through a directory & find out file names containing a particular word. In doing that, learnt quite a few things about Perl.

Arrays - Here is how you manipulate arrays in Perl:

@FRUITS = (”Apple”, “Orange”, “Mango”);

Print the above array:

print @FRUIT;

or

print “@FRUITS”;

File Writing - This was something I found to be utterly simple:

open (SOMEFILE, ‘>>files.txt’);

write (SOMEFILE, “Vishal\n”;

close (SOMEFILE);

The ‘>>’ operator would allow to append at the end of the mentioned file i.e. files.txt

Strings - Concetanation & Splitting. These operations were very similar to the ones available in PHP.

$str = “Hello”;

$str2 = “World”;

$newStr = $str . ” ” . $str2;

$newStr would contain “Hello World”

These were some very basic operations. I plan to do something advanced in the coming days.

Last Wednesday, Microsoft’s Live Labs introduced Thumbtack - a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from websites & share it with others.

Thumbtack would be useful when you are researching for a particular thing like hotels, cars, mobiles, etc. Typically what users do is copy / paste information when researching to a document. It allows you to publish your collections & they can be shared via email as well as a URL. For instance, while researching for mobiles, I quickly created something like this:

http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/tovishalck/Mobiles

Nice way to collaborate. Some people say this is similar to Mozilla Joey (now defunct).

Such a thing could be used in the design phase of a particular project, where the client would point to various reference sites, logos, etc.

I feel this is a good start by Microsoft in the collaboration domain. I will be using this over the next month or so & try out.

I had been trying to find some solutions that would help convert XML to HTML / PDF / RTF. That’s when I came across Apache FOP - Formatting Objects Processor.

It’s built in JAVA & I found it to be pretty good. Apart from the input format it needs, it produces some good formats in output. The only limitation in using it is that it needs the input in the form of Formatting Objects (FO) to produce the desired output. It can also create images & PS formats along with the ones I mentioned above.

I found it to be pretty good. I would recommend to have a look at this incase you need some conversions to be done in the text formatting.

You can find more details at: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

Being a history lover, I was taken aback by surprise when I read this. Google has just taken some 10 Million images from LIFE Magazine’s archives and has hosted them.

It has got images starting from as early as 1750 till date. There is a full screen version too for every image. So these are not simply images that have been just put up, they are all high-quality images.

A couple of them are posted here:

Check out the images at: http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Though the photographs don’t have sufficient information, but it’s good enough such that we can search for what we need.

Another one from Google.

On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. ‘Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,’ Google said in a blog post. ‘It’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.’ For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10035172-93.html - This link has all the details.

This post is about how is on the rise in corporate environments, and how games are also becoming a popular tool for advertising. From internally developed games to commercial offerings to simply creating a framework in which employees can interact, game-based competitions and community building are leading to increased productivity, even for Fortune 500 companies.

Take Microsoft’s own experience. Before it releases a new version of its Windows operating system, it asks staff to help debug the software by installing and running the system. In the past, project managers had to spend a great deal of time and effort persuading busy Microsoftees to help them with this boring task. So for Windows Vista, the system’s latest incarnation, Microsoft created a game that awarded points for bug-testing and prizes such as wristbands for achieving certain goals. Participation quadrupled.

I think it’s a very good way to motivate employees & have the work done by linking both, Games & Work.

What do you think?

For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued. …With eight years of legacy code out there, it is likely that there are going to be a fairly large number of systems that will not migrate to PHP 5 in the near future, and a reasonable proportion of those that will not make the migration at all.

For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP, noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product.

Employment statistics from the US Department of Labor show what most IT people have already realized: IT jobs are getting harder to come by. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13,000 jobs in the information industry were cut in July, bringing the total to 44,000 year over year. An additional 5,000 jobs were lost in telecom this past month.

The statistics reinforce a recent survey of top CIOs who indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff over the coming year. According to a staffing research firm, some jobs have gone to outsourcers, while other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff’s workload.