Category Archives: Technology

Can you create a song on “How Bangalore inspires you” using crowdsource?

Posted in Ideas, Technology
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I was hearing the “Empire state of mind” version of “New York” song by Alicia Keys & Jay Z. It is a good sound track and gives some glimpse of the famous city. If you have been there, and I have been there recently, it is a crazy city. Check the YouTube video with lyrics here.

As someone with a Bangalore connection, if you have to make a song on Bangalore that talks about how the city inspires you, or your experiences and encounters with it, how would you pen it?

To get started, fill in the line below – “In Bangalore … ” or share whatever lines come to your mind. It will be cool to be able to create a crowdsourced song on Bangalore.

Bangalore

And yes, there are problems with every city and I request you to stay positive!

Let’s hear for Bangalore!

Which has more lines of code – Windows or Mac OSX?

Posted in Data visualization, Technology
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If you ever wondered how many lines of code are there in your favorite app, checkout the infographics by Information is beautiful.

And yes, Mac OSX has more lines of code than any Windows OS! Do not miss the last application shown in the infograph.

1276_lines_of_code5

One popular notion in software industry is that “the more code you write, the more bugs you end up with”. What does this data say about the quality of these apps?

Some of you may wonder if these apps can be written with much denser code. There are many reasons why that may not be practically possible – primarily to make applications extensible and maintainable. The other reasons for bloated code can simply be poor programming.

However, we will never know that. I don’t think a tool or benchmark exists that can tell a project manager if an application can be written with fewer lines of code. Even if it does, do you really care?

From BYOD to BYOS – A new service model for enterprise

Posted in Hot, Ideas, People & Culture, Technology
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These days it is not uncommon for you to access your official mails on your personal Blackberry or Android or iPhone. This is exactly what a BYOD or bring-your-own-device model is. It is quite a challenge for enterprise IT teams to ensure security of network and corporate data every time an employee accesses sales report or downloads sensitive information on his own device.

BYOS

The adoption of BYOD is on rise and a recent poll by market researcher IDC shows that more than half the polled companies support employees using their own device. It is also shown that there exists a positive link between usage of employee own device and employee satisfaction. This is a great news as it can help reduce cost as well as boost employee performance.

From BYOD to BYOS

As more employees start to use BYOD model, the boundary is getting pushed beyond devices to include software and services that employees want to use directly. Today 77% of online adults in US use at least one personal cloud service such as Dropbox (a file sharing service). This consumerization of IT is leading to a shift towards more personal choice and ability to personally select the tools that employees want to use. Many products are moving away from perpetual to subscription based model and offering SAAS (software-as-a-service). So, employees are increasingly selecting what is available. Well, if you represent enterprise IT, there are many challenges that you have to deal with.

Security
This is probably the biggest issue to deal with in a BYOS model. Similar to BYOD, organizations need to worry about if these BYOS services meet their security requirements. Moreover concern around providing access to sensitive data has to be solved before the integration can work.

Integration
Though this is somewhat related to security but organizations need to consider any additional cost of hardware and software that these services might need and how requirements across multiple groups can be managed together.

Support
Just like any service model is built with standard SLA, BYOS is no different. It is important to understand them and know the quality of support should things go wrong.

Future proof
Are the services customization and extensible? It is important that BYOS remains compatible with other IT systems and integration points where they are used.

Just like the forces of BYOD models are prevailing, BYOS is here to stay. We better get in front of it!

My ColdFusion book and the learnings!

Posted in Book, Technology
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Late last year, Ben Forta asked me about an opportunity to  tech review ColdFusion 10 book. This was not a difficult task as I had some experience being a tech reviewer of 3rd edition of Enterprise JavaBeans by O’Reilly, one of the most popular book at its time. However, I soon got completely involved with the project as a co-author. I want to share my experience that can help other folks in a similar pursuit with their first book.

ColdFusion Book

What I found most effective is to write down high level sections of the chapters in a top-down approach. This allowed me to ensure that I will be covering the right amount of technical information and a logical flow is already established. The remaining work, then is mostly about filling those sections and fine tuning the sub sections.

With this high level – breakdown approach I was able to achieve a good momentum in finishing the chapters. And this is the second thing that I found effective – riding on a momentum and not getting stuck up with something like an example or a particular section. Since I was always working with a top-down approach, I was able to park sections that were slowing me down. Finishing parking lot items at a later time or on a new day when you are fresh, was much easier and faster.

So, if you are a ColdFusion programmer and have not already bought this book, I strongly recommend the book. It is great addition to ColdFusion 9 WACK series and a relatively thin book focusing on finding what’s new and changed in ColdFusion 10 at a single place. Access additional details on book are here.

Go grab the book from here.