Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Below are some Programming & Software Engineering Podcasts which I listen to during my commute

• Software Engineering Radio

This is one of my current favorites, topics tend to be general programming and at other times on Scalability, Architecture or New trends. Note: iTunes does not show all episodes due to an issue they are working on. Some episodes:

Episode 165: NoSQL and MongoDB with Dwight Merriman

Episode 162: Project Voldemort with Jay Kreps

Episode 160: AspectJ and Spring AOP with Ramnivas Laddad

• Teach Me to Code

A general programming podcast with more dynamic\web bend, topics covered include Agile Development, Python, Ruby on Rails, Design principles such as DRY & interviews. Some episodes:

TMTC 29 – Ron Stephens from python411

RC 16 – The DRY Principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself)

• JavaWorld’s Java Technology Insider

Not updated for an year, but still good one, topics tend to be Java focused. Some episodes:

High scalability and Javawith Todd Hoff

Grails 1.1: A conversation with Graeme Rocher

• Java Posse

A Java focused podcast, more of panel discussion on current Java topics. Regularly updated.

• Stack OverFlow

The creators are from Windows background, the topics vary, the episodes are mix of discussion, news & interviews, and there are at times some good indepth interviews.

Podcast #59 had Damien Katz on CouchDB & Erlang.

More Podcasts:

• The Ruby on Rails Podcast. On Rails
  

• Herding Code. Windows Focus

• FLOSS. All about Free Libre Open Source Software

A similar list, Accidental Technologist: My Updated Developer Podcast List.

Bright Eyes by Catherine Guthrie, Yoga Journal

The top tips

• Reduce burn, redness, irritation in eyes with milk-soaked cotton balls

If they burn or are bloodshot or light sensitive, an excess of pitta may be to blame. To counter it, lie down for 15 minutes with milk-soaked cotton balls on your closed lids. Cucumber slices will also do the trick.

My own experience, this works particularly well for me, making them feel much better. I have not tried the rest yet.

• Vitamin C, vitamin E, and lutein as the best antioxidants for eye health

To infuse your diet with these nutrients, dish up spinach, broccoli, corn, strawberries and nuts. The researchers suggest at least 250 milligrams (mg) of vitamin C, 90 mg of vitamin E, and 3 mg of lutein daily.# These levels are higher than the government’s recommended dietary intake; hedge your bets with a daily multivitamin.

An hour of Yoga 5 times a week should help those sitting in front of monitors

Essentially, we become zombies in front of a glowing screen, blinking only three times a minute instead of the normal 20. The result? Dry eyes.

The class included asana, pranayama, and guided relaxation. Those in the other group spent equal time in the company’s recreation center talking to friends, working out, and watching TV. By study’s end, the yogis reported a 30 percent decline in eye problems like dry eye; eye complaints increased in the other group.

More tips which might work better for others

• Refresh your eyes with water

No matter what your dominant dosha, you can refresh your eyes by splashing them gently with cool water, blinking seven times (once for each chakra, or energy center in the body), and rotating them in all directions.

• Rose water for tired or crusty eyes

If you awaken to eyes that feel tired or more crusty than usual, a kapha imbalance may be to blame, says Malhotra, the author of Inner Beauty: Discover Natural Beauty and Well-Being with the Traditions of Ayurveda. To quell kapha, she suggests sprinkling the eyes with rose water. You can look for rose water in health food stores or Middle Eastern markets, or make your own by soaking an organically grown rose in filtered water overnight

• Ghee (Clarified Butter) for Dry, itchy eyes

Dry, itchy eyes may signal that your vata is out of balance. To restore them, Malhotra recommends a home version of an Ayurvedic treatment called netra basti. To start, warm a quarter cup of ghee (clarified butter) over medium heat, cool it to room temperature, pour half the liquid into an eyecup (sold at drugstores), lean your head back, and bathe the eye for five to seven minutes. Repeat on the other eye using the remaining ghee. (This treatment can be messy, so do it in a bathroom, in clothes that can handle a few drops of ghee.)

What’s more, it’s a good idea to save this self-care routine until just before bedtime, because your vision will be clouded for a few minutes afterward.

Highlights from The Way I Work: Paul English, Co-founder Kayak

• Up everyday at 6:00, Email & then Yoga. Has a meditation room.

• We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I’ve spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.

• Always drives kid to school.

• We have offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We started with the first two because my co-founder, Steve Hafner, lives in Connecticut, I live in Boston, and neither one of us wanted to move.

• We have an open office environment. our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. Most engineers are introverted. Here, when people overhear a discussion, we encourage them to walk over and say, “There’s another way to do that.”

• The engineers and I handle customer support. If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

• Real time datamining and support information. We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site — how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you’re walking by and you see, “Oh, Dan just answered a question.” We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.

• I keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It’s also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force.

• I do all of the firing. At times, I’ve fired maybe one out of every three people I’ve hired. That might make people think I’m bad at hiring, but I think I’m quite good at hiring. The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people — that’s what Expedia has — is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology.

• Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I’m not a great cook, but it’s fun to have people over.

• I read for an hour every night before going to bed. I love reading books by Indian authors. I’ll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don’t like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.

Recently I was reading up on Design Patterns & Java to refresh my knowledge and was pleasantly surprised to see a pretty large number of patterns used in the JDK(Java SDK or rather the Java standard library) and Java Frameworks such as Hibernate and Spring. I have seen this in STL among others to a lesser degree.
Here are some, in no particular order:

The links are to Wikipedia Design Pattern pages which I liked over the Portland pattern repository for overview:

• Factory pattern: Any method which creates an objects, initializes it and returns it. socket.getInputStream(), Executors.newFixedThreadPool(), Collections.singleton(), etc

• Iterator pattern: Used to traverse collections. Collection.getIterator()

• Decorator pattern: Use to wrap\convert Streams adding functionality to them. Not Adapter pattern due to added functionality. Wrap a FileInputStream into a Reader and use .readLine() to read lines.

• Chain-of-responsibility pattern: The streams as above, the Streams chained handle the request and pass it after operating on it. Criteria, an alternative to HQL in Hibernate.

• Strategy pattern: Concrete strategies to implement family of algorithms which are interchangeable. All collections are strategies, accessible using a common interface, depending what what is stored, Map interface can be HashMap, TreeMap, LinkedHashMap

• Template method pattern: Define the skeleton of an algorithm in an operation, deferring some steps to subclasses. java.util.AbstractCollection expects iterator, size, add and provides addAll, clear, contains, containsAll, isEmpty, remove, etc.

• Singleton pattern: Java Security Manager, System.getSecurityManager(); Socket accept and other permissions

• Prototype pattern: Has a Cloneable marker interface, which indicates to Object.clone() that it is legal\safe to make a field copy. Should not be done for open files, self-allocated memory, ….

• Observer pattern: Built in support in JDK including Observer interface & Observable classes.

There are many more such as Thread pool pattern, Inversion of control which forms the basis of Spring framework and so on.

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.