Category Archives: General

Tech Trends to Watch- 2023

2023 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/4-emerging-technologies-you-need-to-know-about

My personal favorites

AI and ML: Well, calling this trend to watch will not be correct as AI is already happening. Right from recommending you the next product to buy to self-driving cars.
IoT: World is more connected with home appliances and vehicles publishing data, that gets analyzed in real-time.
Edge Computing: Computation being done near the source of data and quick real-time decisions being taken.
Quantum computing: This will become more practical and accessible providing help in research and performance in different fields.
Digital Twins: Digital replication of physical systems helping analyze and predict the impact of different parameters.
CyberSecurity: With tech becoming part of the day today life, security is a major concern.
Blockchain: The decentralized ledger is going beyond cryptocurrencies to supply chain management and digital identity.
Robotics and Drones: By automating the way work is done and use for delivery, surveillance will increase.
Virtual and Augmented Reality(VR/AR): Providing new ways for people to interact with and experience the world.
Metaverse: Virtual world experience enabled by VR, AR, IoT, NFTs, and blockchain.
Web 3.0: Decentralization of Internet empowered by blockchain, decentralization and AI.

BigData Ecosystem

Apache Hadoop: an open-source software framework for storing and processing large volumes of data in a distributed computing environment.

Major components- HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) – for storing data, and MapReduce – for processing data.

Apache Pig: Works on top of Hadoop to write data analysis programs in an easier way.

Apache Hive: SQL-like query language for Hadoop.

Apache Storm: It is a distributed, real-time processing system for big data. It has the ability to process data in real time, which makes it well-suited for use cases such as real-time analytics for stocks, fraud detection, and event-driven applications.

Apache Spark: It provides an in-memory data processing engine, which makes it faster and more flexible than Hadoop’s MapReduce for many use cases.

4 Vs of Big Data:

  • Volume: which normal RDBMS databases cannot store or are not meant to process.
  • Velocity: Speed at which data is getting added.
  • Variety: Structures, Semi-structured and unstructured. Traditional systems are meant only for Structured data. For example, reviews, comments, images, etc are nonstructured data
  • Veracity: Non-verified data. Data that may or may not be useful. Inconsistent data which cannot be used straight away.

Getting rid of Babylon virus

Well, it is not exactly a virus, but babylon plugin can impose itself on your browser in form of search toolbars or default search setting. It has happened to me more than once now, so sharing some quick steps of getting rid of it here. Please note that at times this app/ toolbar will be stored as any other name, so look out for anything suspicious and out of place.

1. Remove the app: Check if a program is shown under add/ remove program (go to control panel-> uninstall program) with name babylon. Remove it.

2. Remove toolbar: Check if toolbar exists under browser toolbars, and remove it.

Firefox: Go to Add Ons->look for babylon

IE: Go to Manage Add Ons->Toolbars and extensions->look for babylon

3. Remove as default search engine: For IE Manage Add Ons-> Search providers->babylon (in my case it was named just default)

More info www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418379,00.asp

Forgot your Tortoise SVN Password?

It happen to me a couple of times. Basically in Tortoise svn, you just need to add the password once and save it, it will keep working for months or years. In case I need to checkout another repository and it would ask the password again, it would be a nightmare.

But this simple tool helped- http://www.leapbeyond.com/ric/TSvnPD/

Download the exe file and execute it, it will pull out all the passwords saved for SVN.

BigData and the hype

You must be hearing a lot of noise around the term BigData these days. What exactly is big data and how is it impacting the tech world?

As the name suggests, it is about data, a lot of data, huge data. What’s new? The amount and type of data. Data mining has already been an important part of any company right now, it helps them understand current trends and predict future upto a certain level. With BigData coming in, the concept is stretched further.

Let’s take an example, an ecommerce website wishes to understand customer behavior to improve its reputation and responsiveness. Where can it find the data, past sales, logs, customer activity on the website, blogs, facebook, twitter, google plus.. phew, that is tones of data. But the more data you can collect, a better decision you can make.

The challenges include- collection of data, search the relevant data, storage and most importantly the analysis i.e. conversion of raw data to useful information. Think about it, if a company can convert all the raw data related to its brand available on the various arenas to useful information like what people think about it, what are their exceptions, how to improve user experience etc, it will be a big win for the company.

Related post: http://kamalmeet.com/2013/03/infosys-launches-big-data-edge/

Samsung Galaxy Note 2

I have been using samsung galaxy note 2 for more than 6 months now, so thought of sharing some highlights which might help others in making a choice when buying a similar phone.

Screen Size: This is the best thing about this phone. The phablet provides you with a screen in which reading emails/ ebooks is very easy. For the first time I am able to read ebooks so easily on my phone.

Sleek: When I bought note 2, I had a doubt that if it will be easier to carry it along because of the screen size. But sleek width and light weight helps me carry it easily in my pocket.

Speed: Another good thing about this 1.6 GHz phone is I have never seen this slow down or hang, no matter how many applications are in process.

Battery Life: Amazingly the phone’s battery life is much better than I expected. My last Android phobe had a battery life of 1.5 days, but note 2, even with a big screen, can give me more than 2 days easily with regular usage.

Navigator: The big screen helps me use navigate feature of android very easily, it has helped me find out easy routes and alternatives for many destinations.

Camera: With 8 Megapixel camera and great flash, I have not carried a camera in any of my trips since I bought this phone.

Singleton Pattern #1: Basics, Definition, Usage

Singleton pattern: As the name suggests, a singleton pattern refers to a pattern where you need only a ’single’ instance of a class to be present. The examples can be windows manager where you want only one window to be active at a time or a file read write where only one method should be updating a file at a time.

Here is a skeleton example of a singleton class:

Public Class singletonExample
{
private static singletonExample instance=null;
private singletonExample{
// no instantiation is possible
}

public static singletonExample getInstance()
{
if (instance==null)
{
instance=new singletonClass();
}
return instance;
}
}

the caller class

public class singletonUser{
singletonExample singletonInstance= singletonExample.getInstance();
}

Explanation:

Here singletonExample is our singleton class. In the first line we have created an instance of this class as null. We have declared a private constructor for the class to make sure that no object of class can be created outside the class.

getInstance() method is the entry point for the class which will return the only instance present for the class. This method is marked as static as it will be called directly from other classes. In this method we check if the instance of singletonExample is already present, if yes, return that instance else create the instance and return it. This makes sure that only one instance of the class is present at any point.

In the user class, that is calling our singleton class, we just need to call our singletonExample.getinstance() method which will return us the instance of singletonExample.

Originally posted February 13, 2007 at 2:10 pm

Brought back using archive.org

How to create an effective professional PowerPoint presentation

Bringing old post back from dead courtesy archive.org

I have seen a lot of official presentations which are awfully boring and instead of conveying any message they confuse the audience. So when I had to deliver a presentation some days back, I did some research on how to create an effective PowerPoint Presentation; and here are my findings-

1. KISS your presentation. Ok, don’t create the presentation and then kiss the monitor. What I mean by KISS here is “Keep It Simple, Stupid (Sir :) )”. Yes, if you are creating a professional PowerPoint presentation, there is no place for flashy or cool looks.
2. Size of presentation should be controlled; very big presentations can bore the audience.
3. No over attracting backgrounds to the PowerPoint.
4. The background color and font color should be contrasting, so that text can be easily read.
5. Font selection: No designer fonts are recommended, simple Ariel, SanSerif, Verdana etc. should be good. Font Size should be big enough to read clearly, minimum of 22 or 24.
6. Consistency: Changing background, Fonts, Colors can be distracting.
7. Contents: Be precise; don’t give too much detail in your PowerPoint presentation. You can provide additional details separately if required; you can also provide online links in the presentation for detailed info.
8. Animations: No place for cool animations in a professional PowerPoint presentation, too many flying texts and images will distract the audience attention from the actual content. A simple Appear/disappear or similar plain animations should do.
9. Focus: Check for every slide where the default focus is. That is, it may be possible that the important information is on top-left part but the attention is occupied by some other portion as some image, useless text is displayed somewhere else.
Point to note for checking the slide’s focus

->Control font size: Font size can be very important in terms of attracting attention. The bigger the size, the more attention it will attract.
->Use lists to break the complex info in points format
->Make information appear on the screen when you need it. E.g. if there are 4 points (text or images) to be shown and you want to emphasize each point, make them appear one by one.
->Use graphs to simplify complex data.
->Use images and graphics to support your point as they can be memorized better than the words.

10. Finally take a look at your presentation as a viewer and see how others will perceive it. If you are not convinced with your slides, no way others can be influenced by the same.

Suggested readings

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getworkdone/presentations.mspx
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/cs/marketing/a/7sinsofppt.htm
http://sbinformation.about.com/od/sales/a/presentationtip.htm
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/kill_your_prese.html

Originally posted March 28, 2007 at 5:02 pm