Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Barclays resurrects Lehman

According to sources at Lehman, London based financial services firm Barclays had come to rescue Lehman. Barclays, the fourth largest financial services provider (according to Tier1 capital) will be taking over the US division only. Barclays is a major global financial services provider operating in Eurobe, Asia, United States, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

We can live without Batman, Ipod or even Starbucks coffee, but..

We can live without Batman, Ipod or even Starbucks coffee, most of us at least. But it is
not an exaggeration if I said we would not last a week without (no I am not even talking about
Simpson’s) Google or open source. These are the two best things that a man can ever ask for.
No seriously, can you spend a day without opening the Google web page? Forget a day, I bet you
cannot do for an hour. Same is the case with open source if you are programming for a living.
Recently I have launched a website and without open source it would have been impossible to
finish building it under two months. I would like to thank the authors of those open source
tools and would like to mention how I got to use them in a hope that it may help others too.

[The website is built using Java, JSP, Servlets, Hibernate, MySQL, Tomcat, Lucene technologies]

Display Tag libraries
URL: http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/11/
Display tag is jsp tag library to display data in tabular format.

CSS Star Ratings By Paul OB
URL: http://www.search-this.com/2007/05/23/css-the-star-matrix-pre-loaded/
CSS The Star Matrix is a CSS based visual rating gadget (if you will) that lets you
rate, well anything.

Captcha By Michael Connor
URL: http://www.jroller.com/mlconnor/entry/simple_captcha_jsp
I know I wanted a Captcha. But I did not even know it was called a Captcha when I started looking for it. Anyway I stumbled upon a simple captach in a JSP. You can argue all you wish about how evil writing java code in JSP. It did not matter to me. Especially when I was in time pressure.
I got this captcha working under 5 minutes.

Silver Orange Tab Menus By Daniel Burka
URL: http://labs.silverorange.com/images/tabsupdate/about.html
Being a server side programmer, I had no clue about CSS and no time to learn either.
But these tabs saved my day.

Nifty Round Cornets By Alessandro Fulciniti
http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html
I always wondered how you get those professional looking round cornered edges. These css tips
made my site more well rounded!

Toggle Script
http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-21673.html
This toggle script is definitely not as dandy as the ones Adobe (Spry), Yahoo (YUI) or
dojo may provide. If you have more time to invest, you may want to explore these options.

I thank many others who indirectly or directly helped me build the website.

Subbu Vedula
http://www.slinqy.com

Sunday, June 15, 2008

To Mr. Night Shyamalan

When Shyamalan made Signs, some magazine (Was it Time?) said the next Spielberg has arrived. Signs was a stupid enough movie and he was called the next Spielberg. Whoever said that, yeah he delivers "The Happening" now. If you had no problem with Signs (as stupid a movie as it was), why would you have a problem with this one?

Anyway, why is not there a phenomenon (like vegetation forcing you to kill yourself) that kills your appetite to write inane stories (So that I would not need to be writing this either). I too have several ideas. But an idea is not a story. Idea is not a plot. Idea cannot be a movie. Night knows it. At least he knew it when he made Sixth Sense. Somewhere along the line he may have forgotten. Shyamalan, you can do it. We cannot help. If you cannot write, please stick to directing. I may even have a better story than most of your own.

Sarkar Raj - Ram Gopal Varma

Someone tell me that there comes an end to Ramu's obsession. Even Coppola or Puzo could not be this fanatic about this subject. There is nothing really wrong with the movie. And there is nothing right about it either. In my opinion he made three movies. One god father kind, another bhoot and lastly "kshana kshanam". Please somebody tell him there is more to life and cinema than whatever he makes in the name of God Father.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Sex, Jobs, and Social Networking

Contrary to popular belief Quayle did not invent sex. Clinton? May be! But I am sure you already know sex was just a side effect of boredom. Anyway, since I got your attention now, we can move on to the real topic.
Are networking sites the elixir for psychological problems the current world is facing? Shouldn't we be grateful that lack of time to interact with human beings in their real form is being addressed by these networking sites. Or am I seeing the image flipped?
Aren’t there enough networking sites already? Why in this world did they bother to create yet another one? The reason is simple. They seem to have awfully lot of time at their hands. Instead of lying on the beach arguing how the Baseball is invented from thin air (Of course, there is no comparison between Cricket and Baseball, are you kidding?) while sipping pina coladas or sitting in their lazyboy couch watching Gladiator on plasma TV and wondering what exactly Crowe did to compensate for his lack of acting skills in securing an Oscar, or watching world news on CNN (Yeah the world news! There are two hundred plus countries out there). Anyway I seem to digress a bit.
So what did they create now? Great guess! Another networking site. What is new about it?Is it just a coincidence that more people are looking for jobs? Anyway, they created a job portal. They suddenly felt compassion for all these small companies (and of course for those giant companies too that did not mind throwing, meant to say lending, money away) that end up paying loads of money to other jobs sites for posting jobs and decided to make it a free portal. They created good enough features such as employers partnering with other employers to place employees or to fill job openings. They implemented a comprehensive permission structure for partnering employers.
Talking about job seekers - how many times have you tweaked that thing called resume (If you are a modest or an honest individual you can never create this thing. On the other hand you must be slightly egoistic like CEO of Netzero. Oh come on now, don't you agree? How many CEOs act in their own commercials?) to custom fit it to the job requirement. Didn't you ever send a resume to NASA saying you are an aerospace engineer and a different resume again to NASA only claiming you are a plumber? That’s a slight exaggeration. Point is, their portal lets job seekers track the resumes. If job seekers ever try to send a resume more than once to the same company, the job seeker will be asked for confirmation. Of course there are many other features that I do not want to list and bore you. I know you have more important web sites like rottentomatoes.com, youtube.com or bored.com to visit. After all, it is not our idea to promote the web site. I must check with my agent, why she got me into writing this if the idea is not to promote the web site. By the way she is a Chihuahua. No, it is not a rat. How many of you felt like eating at Taco Bell after seeing the commercial with a Chihuahua.
"What you blabbered so far has nothing to do with Networking", you may conclude prematurely. The features mentioned above coupled with Google’s adwords advertisement did not attract enough client base. Nothing wrong with Google adwords but it is probably the paltry advertisement budget to be blamed. So they came up with this brilliant idea to enhance the existing portal with networking features. As they thought more, more it made sense. Employers can write prose* (We are all professionals, aren't we?) to other employers and job seekers. Job seekers can do the same too. So the big idea is misery loves company. I cannot believe I said that. No that is not I meant to say. The idea is to have fun and work combined into one portal. Now those work place proxy servers that filter out networking sites.. I suggest this site be kept out of that filter list. Why? I have three points to make. First it is a site for professionals. Third, you will know how many of your employees are unhappy with their job and you. I covered all three points, What?


*Prose: the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse.


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P.S: I apologize for those writings. The above article in fact is written by my agent without my endorsement. In hindsight, she did a great favor to the human race. Oh well, the portal certainly is not as ground breaking as the wheel or Google is, but worth a check.