Vishal Kothari

I have been hearing a lot about the Swine Flu or the H1N1 Virus. After the cases that have been reported, it sounds really scary.

Personally, I would advise to avoid travel. That’s the first step. Few others would be to wash your hands regularly, covering your mouth & nose while sneezing & coughing.

Just thought it would be good to share some other info about it here:

Source: WebMD

Who is at risk?

Those who are more at risk from becoming seriously ill with swine flu are people with:

• chronic (long-term) lung disease, including people who have had drug treatment for their asthma within the past three years,
• chronic heart disease,
• chronic kidney disease,
• chronic liver disease,
• chronic neurological disease (neurological disorders include motor neurone disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis),
• suppressed immune systems (whether caused by disease or treatment),
• diabetes,
• pregnant women,
• people aged 65 or older, and
• young children under five.

Source: National Health Service, UK website

More resources:

http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1FLU/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza

http://www.in.com/swineflu/

Please take good care of yourselves!

The first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa has gone live. The cable would connect South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya & Uganda to Europe & Asia.

This would definitely have a huge positive impact on the region’s industry & commerce. The cable itself is 17,000 km long. It took 2 years to lay this cable with a cost of $650 mn. The pirate activity off the coast of Somalia delayed the launch by 2 months, against it’s original launch in June 09.

This would also mean that East Africa would open up a possibility of a new outsourcing location. People who have been looking at this region, but turning it down due to bad internet access, will now reconsider it. This might affect other regions like India, Russia, etc.

Most of you would be unaware, but there is a fierce competition going on between Google and Facebook to establish their competing visions for the future of the internet.

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this ’social graph’ to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search.

It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

A related article at ReadWriteWeb suggests that while Facebook’s member base is enormous, the company hasn’t taken advantage of its influence as well as it should have, though the capability for it to do so still exists.

Hey Guys,

After I read this address from Steve Jobs, I couldn’t resist writing this post the next minute. I will give a small brief on what it is about, and you should go ahead & read the entire address in the attached file.

Jobs is narrating 3 stories at Stanford University, where he is attending a graduation ceremony. He focusses on 3 points:

1. His learning about calligraphy, which was the cause for Mac to have multiple typefaces. Windows just copied the Mac.

2. Getting fired from the company he started. Strangely, that was the best thing to happen to him. And that’s the cause of Apple being where it is right now.

3. Live each day as if it was your last day.

I would request all of you to go through this address. It’s encouraging, motivating & the bottom line…it’s true.

Click here to download the entire address.

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.

Taken from Wikipedia:

Zeitgeist is a german language expression split as: Zeit: time, Geist: spirit. It means ‘the spirit of the age & it’s society’. It describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambiance and moral of an era or a trend.

It also refers to the Weekly, monthly, and annual reports released by Google and based on millions of searches. Google just came out with the list of ‘Fastest rising’ & ‘most popular’ searches for 2008. It can be found at:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2008/world.html

A couple of surprise entries for me were that of “Genelia d’souza”, thanks to Aamir Khan. The second was ’sixth pay commission’. Well, despite of so many terrorist attacks happening in India in the last 11 months, very few people are wanting to know about that I guess.

Clearly, Cricket & Bollywood are the winners for the Indian Googler, apart from Social Networking ofcourse.

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.

Wall street is going to be renamed to Fall street.

This is bound to happen if companies keep on tumbling like a pack of cards.

Bear Sterns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, AIG

These are the ones already affected. And there might be more in line like Goldman Sachs. There is a lot of buying / selling taking place at Wall Street. Not sure if that’s a panic sign.

What to do? Where to invest? Which stock to invest in? - If you ask me, I would still say “Do Nothing”. Some people might say that you can still trade in such a market & make money. That’s possible, but you have to be 200% sure that you are going to earn in the short term.

Be patient & watch the proceedings.