Blogs

Over the last couple of years open source software has gradually shifted from developer’s desktop to corporate infrastructure. Born out of university labs, this is quite a commendable journey. While this trend is captured in quite a few studies around that capture the mood and sentiment of CIOs, Architects; this particular post from silicon.com caught our attention sometime back. Sure, most of us were convinced about the economic impact of open source besides the freedom part, but we perhaps weren’t thinking about the magnitude of that impact. As the post and the quoted study suggest the economic impact – in this case lost sales opportunity of proprietary software to open source is estimated to be $ 1 trillion per year. How does that compare with the revenues of some of the largest software companies in the world, say Microsoft at $ 60 billion? There you go.  read more »

This one just showed up in my news feed reader and wow! From what it looks like it has been around for sometime (here are the past winners) but I just happened to miss it thus far. Anyways if you are a computer science or related stream female student in India, then this should interest you. The program details are available at http://www.google.co.in/jobs/womeninengineering/.  read more »

http://developer.android.com/guide/tutorials/hello-world.html#avd

The instructions read:
To create an AVD, use the "android" tool provided in the Android SDK. Open a command prompt or terminal, navigate to the tools/ directory in the SDK package and execute:

That means you need to type
./android create avd --target 2 --name my_av

in the command line (on Linux) since android is an executable file.

Some time back I had posted about languages such as C, C++, Java which are still very popular. For students, if they were to optimize on time and effectiveness it seems like a easy pick to build solid development skills. Sure there are many others such as php, ruby, python etc, but then having strong fundamentals not only helps the learning curve of other languages but is desirable as well and looks like there are all the inputs available.  read more »

Last week Jack Wallen at Tech Republic posted an interesting topic on why companies should look at open source developers. Of all the 5 reasons that are in support of the case perhaps the most compelling one is the first one which is ; you can check what the developers has done in terms of contributions made even before you decide to interview. I bet irrespective of whether the area of requirement is around open source or proprietary, this is a huge plus over traditional interview process.  read more »

Baseline reported the trends in tech jobs based on what folks at Dice.com are talking about. From what it looks like Jobs in security are still on top of the charts. Not surprising given that with more and more connected economy it also brings in its share of challenges when it comes to security.

Virtualization has jumped to #2 spot which also makes one think of cloud computing as not just a fad but companies seriously considering it. Technologies like Java, .Net are still popular compared to the new kids in the block such as Ruby, Python, etc.  read more »

This was my Aha! moment with virtualization. Having played around with Vmware, Xen and Virtualbox, missed this subtle feature that really makes the guest and the host OS share the desktop seamlessly. Check out the interesting post by Jack Wallen  read more »

Computer science courses world over traditionally have been more than favorable to C, C++. Few do introduce Java but majority stick to providing computer science fundamentals leaving it to students to pick language skills on their own. Fundamentally a sound strategy except that students , due to lack of exposure often are unclear which way to go and end up following the stereotypes. Now choice of a language would typically depend on the objective especially in the context of a project or domain, but if one were to get started first with a set to get over the basics, what are the options?  read more »

MySQL Librarian a great source for learning resources on MySQL. FAQ except from the site

MySQL Librarian aims to be a place for all of the MySQL Community to place the links to the best MySQL-related material on the web. We keep finding fantastic data spread all over the web from presentations to articles and pictures that we want to share. So if you have a favourite link to a tip, article or something MySQL cool add it to the Librarian and share it with others.
 read more »

Reuters just reported a story on China regarding graduate students - China says two million new graduates jobless. While the situation is blamed on perhaps a little too aggressive planning to enroll students the other part of the challenge lies in the education content. Is that suited to industry requirements? According to the report

They also cite the education system's failure to produce graduates with the qualifications and skills that employers need as well as unrealistically high job and salary expectations on the part of some college leavers.
 read more »