News from August, 2007

If you dig RubyOnRails, the TwinCities market is pretty attractive right now. I know a couple of good recruiters who are on the lookout ; if you are interested I can hook you up with them. Contact me at arun.batchu@gmail.com

As an Information software architect, I find myself increasingly relying on philosophy and metaphysics to solve IT's increasingly complex problems. IT is no more a single person's endeavor but a multi-stakeholder enterprise.

Something, somewhere suggested I read this book called Code name God by Dr. Mani Bhaumik. Wow what a person and what a book. I was promised I would be moved by the book. I was not only moved, I was flung. Mani's journey from abject poverty to stupendous wealth to his quest for spiritual enlightenment, in a single lifetime is sensational. His cogent arguments, if you keep an open mind, will convince you about his code for God. If not for his practical achievements, I would be inclined to dismiss his theory as interesting but impractical; but his incredible upbringing, his scientific accomplishments, his rich and famous lifestyle and eventually, his quest for the source and anchoring it in pure, advanced science (quantum physics) has convinced me to contemplate what he has to say very , very seriously.

Check it out:

mani bhaumik@google

For those of you who know me, I have been chattering about my fascination with the micro: ants, bees, etc. Long time ago I had started reading about how nature has evolved complex behavior in order to glean some architectures to adapt for solving IT problems. National Geographic magazine's July 2007 carried an excellent recap of this swarm intelligence in action. It referred to this book called "The wisdom of crowds" that I have been meaning to read. The article finally triggered me to get it.

Is it just me or have others noticed too an increase in the frequency of new connections (good thing!) in their http://LinkedIn.com network?. I would love to see a topological map of connection density. I wonder if it is another ScaleFree network? Does the graph look like a PowerLaw graph?

MichaelNygard has written in his book about RecoveryOrientedComputing ( ROC) . I had meant to investigate the principles: http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/ . This is a breadcrumb for myself to followup.

My wise friend DionStewart reminded me that I should readup on ULS (UltraLargescaleSystems), an initiative/research project by US department of Defence and the Software Engineering Institute.

Of late, our team at DOR (yours truly, DanMcCreary, AlexBleasdale, JasonParker) has been working with XQuery a lot. We love it. We love eXist database. Here is an article that if you ignore the marketing hype, still is close to what we found : http://www.xquery.com/customers/volpe.html

I resonated quite well with this talk by Amazon.com's CTO (Dr. Vogels). If you are an IT architect / lead developer or one of the CXO's of Information Technology - you should take the time to absorb it ( at least the salient points).

Thanks to MichaelNygard for referring me to the article/talk.

My wise friend LarryWinship forwarded me this article. Hope you find it as useful as I did.

Ran into my former colleague: DaleSchumacher. In a short span of 15 minutes we exchanged a whole load of info (nothing, nothing can beat the face to face communication bandwidth). Anyway, the conversation confirmed my interest in SwarmIntelligence and DanMcCreary's suggestion of programming languages that leverage the coming multi-cores. So got the Erlang book.

Looks like Erlang is a FunctionalLanguage.

People do not realize how much the simple power of the noble WikiWord is essential for the immersive magic of the Wiki . Lately I have been playing with SharePoint2007 and realized that in their wiki implementation, in their infinite but inexperiential wisdom, the designers eliminated the camel-casing WikiWord. Alas! The automagic of LinkingByAccident is lost. The flow of automatically linking while jotting down your thoughts is lost.

For the casual observer my rant may seem a bit overblown and whiny but the "speed" of the editable web of information is lost when I have to do this: [[LinkingByAccident]] than just LinkingByAccident. The EconomyOfExpression has a lot to be said especially when you want to encourage HighFrequencyLowWavelength behavior in transmitting information within your InformationNetworks

Books about wikis ,