Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Here is something I have used a few times. Yahoo Research has a TagMaps project, WorldExplorer which shows main tags for any place and pictures.
One can quickly decide what to visit in a place.

Here is an image which shows places in Santa Barbara

And here is an interactive Flash widget for Peru.

One of the researcher behind this is Mor Naaman

Try India and San Francisco, see if you can find Yoga in the Presidio or find out why Machu Pichcu does not show up in Peru.

The talks at Open Source Conference (OSCON 2009) by O’Reilly are 45 minute sessions. This year, the conference is in San Jose, CA from July 20 - 24, 2009.

I would like to see the following ones this year.

These ideas were triggered from my own search fora proposal and have some link to my own background of a Web services backend engineer on Linux.

On Grid Programming

• Real life MapReduce examples using Apache Hadoop with Java & Streaming API

This would cover pseudo and real code for actual real life examples for Map Reduce, going beyond what is there at the end of the Google Map Reduce white paper. These would be projects powered by Apache Hadoop.

• Tour of Facebook\Apache Thrift

This would cover different aspects including serialization across same language, data transfer using their transport API & across different languages

• HDFS setup and access from Java\Rails

This would be for those considering using it as a DFS without Map Reduce. Leo touched on the topic in the blog entry, Rearchitecting Twitter

General Programming

• Java web frameworks and how they fit in together?

Unlike say Rails, Java has a wide array of web frameworks, see Wikipedia’s list in Java enterprise platform category. It might make sense to highlight a few like Raible did earlier, Comparing JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts 2, Tapestry and Wicket, however showing different ones as used in the Terracota Exam App.

• Python libraries and packages you were not aware of

The title says it all.

• Becoming a better Python Programmer

Something beyond the coding standards and idioms in the PEPs.

Desktop & Tools

• Linux desktop applications you might not know about
  

Again the title says it all, for example, for me, this would cover Amarok for playing music files, TakeNote or Tuxcards for outline note taking, Freemind for mind mapping and more, this would begin where the Linux Journal Readers‘ Choice Awards 2008 end.

• Top Open Source Personal productivity tools

The title says it all

• Best Open Source Developer Tools

This is a tricky one and would require multiple programmers to come up with a complete list, a Kernel programmer would be happy using vi\emacs, while a Java one would use Eclipse or Netbeans and so on.

If you are interested in presenting these, do consider making a proposal at the OSCON 2009 Call for Participation. The last date is Feb 3rd 2009.

Presenters get a free pass to the regular conference.

Economist has an article on Evan Williams, Founder and Creator of Blogger, Odeo and Twitter: The accidental innovator

Some snippets with minor grammer changes for continuity:

Ideas:

First insight, that genuinely new ideas are, well, accidentally stumbled upon rather than sought out; second, that new ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known;

Controlled Passion:

Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. In theory he could have done this at Google with his “20% time” on the side, but in practice he found it tedious to pitch ideas to the Google bureaucracy. Left and right brains clashed in other ways.

Radical Constraints:

One mental trick is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

Loves Frustration:

For the same reason, Mr Williams loves frustration. Blogger revealed itself when he was frustrated with something bigger: collaboration software.

This year, if you would like to have a different way to send a holiday greeting, post it on any yahoo webpage.

me2u.yahoo.com allows you to create a greeting or any message as an ad and send it to a yahoo.com user (sorry no international users rights now.)
They will see the ad on any *.yahoo.com page when they login next.

If it is displayed and not ‘viewed’ (incase it was missed), they get an email mentioning it and it will be displayed again a few times.

Pretty nifty stuff!

Greg Linden wrote in Show advertising people might want about showing Consumers the ads that they want.

Advertising can be useful information about products and services we actually want. The advertisements we see should be helpful and interesting, not annoying and irrelevant.

I use to believe in that and have skipped\avoided ads due to the noise there is. But working in Advertising field in someways (I am in a Software Engineer Yahoo Display Advertising department), I came to believe, another thing, that sometimes Consumers might not know what they want or might try out, this includes a new cereal, a new updated car model, a new serial coming up, until they learn about it and try it out. To re-quote,

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted faster horses. Henry T. Ford, inventor and entrepreneur.

So, there is a balance between desire and needs and another angle is creating awareness.

Greg is right on about Personalized advertising. If you are interested, take a look at the Targeting options, Yahoo provides, specifically Yahoo! Behavioral Targeting or BT as we call it, which has been in place for a while now.

Personalizing advertising — targeting to advertising to individual interests — can make advertisements relevant, useful, and helpful. By learning from what each person likes and does not like, personalized advertising can use that fleeting glimpse of our attention to show us something we actually might need.

Disclaimer: The blog entries and opinions mentioned in this blog are my own personal viewpoints and do not represent my employer’s view in any way.

You can callout your CEO’s latest viewpoint as ancient or extinct.

Do not know, if it is Hubris, plain Frustration or Refusal to take something so off lying down, Dare in Dinosaur Country redux shows Chutzpah (as per Wikipedia, the quality of audacity, for good or for bad) abd points out Microsoft, his employer to be in Dinosaur country, with the Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer saying in an interview

We need to change our capabilities so that we are not just good at writing bits that you put out on CD and deliver, but rather writing this thing that is a living, breathing, dynamic, organic thing.”

If enough people like Dare keep prodding the Giant, it might even wake up. Though, the reality is, it makes a lot of money from the Software on those CDs and pre-installed systems.