Love for social networking demystified...

I love social networking, so much that I have always been the early joiners of every social networking site that has ever come up. Be it orkut, facebook, twitter or more recently google buzz.

I guess one of the reasons for their success is that these sites allow people to express their opinion/mood/basically themselves in few words. Thing with blogging is, to make a point, to express something you have to write a couple of paragraphs. But nothing like this is expected from you on these social networking sites. In fact they encourage you to keep things simple and short. I guess it is an inherent tendency of ours to get heard, to get noticed, we want people to listen to us, to our opinion. But many of us are not capable, rather don't bother to write a blog about these things, and social networking sites present an easier an simpler solution to express yourself.

Well I am one of such people, and I guess that is why I am so high on social networking.

Jobs I wish I can do, but never will

While waiting for the bus in the morning, it hit me that what are those jobs that I so wish I could take, but never will.. So this is my bucket list of such jobs and I plan (ahh.. I plan.. well I know at this very moment that this is going to flop) to keep updating this list...

1) Bartender - I guess this one was to get easy girls and free alcohol. Life of a bartender looks so much fun, but as I am writing this down I am actually thinking how much stress they have to face when people keep shouting at them for their drinks, worse than stress during our project deadlines.

2) Waiter @ a food joint - This was/is(still not sure about it) a part of my American Dream job. To study in a college and work at burger joint for that extra cash :P I guess the reason behind the love for this job is to meet different people.

Finding new love in Intellij

Recently Idea has released a community edition of its intellij browser. I had heard so much about it that I decided to give it a shot. The editor is pretty sleek, not shiny like eclipse. In fact the editor looks almost like a notepad window. Good thing is I am liking it, it keeps u closer to ur code without showing too many jazzy stuff, letting me write cleaner code.

Another thing I liked about it the concept of projects and modules in intellij, I think its much better than eclipse's concept of workspace. Again intellij is able to handle multiple modules involving loads of libraries in a much better manner.

The only thing I miss are the shortcuts, even though I am using eclipse key mapping here, but its still not the same. A useful plugin for intellij is key promoter which prompts u to use keyboard shortcuts over mouse. I am using intellij as full time IDE and hope will stick with it.

Here I go again!!

Again I have got my blogging josh back, and this time I seriously hope it lasts for more than 1 blog post. Last few months have been seriously hectic, good thing is I learnt a lot technically. I am actually working on an iPhone application and though it was all fun in the begining its all about meeting deadlines now. There is so much I want to learn but I am still not sure if IT is the field I want to stick in. The only reason is that it doesn't pay me well and I am just so far behind from the rest of my batch. I just hope s.th better happens so that I can continue to do what I love to do and what I think I can do best.

Anyways currently besides iPhone app I am reading data structures and algorithms. At this point in my career I am able to better understand them. Going through each of these makes u understand the machine better and I think makes u a better programmer. Also as the book is written in C I am able to write almost beginner's code in the language I have always wanted to learn. Besides this python, GWT, cloud computing are on my list now. OSGi is something I was reading few months back but left it midway. Really bad thing about me is I am never able to finish things, I just leave them midway, just hope same doesn't happen to what I am doing rite now.

So long for now.. I wish I'll be able to post some blogs on what I have understood about various things I am reading

So long!!

I have always wanted to blog, not because I want some one to read it, but just because there are so many things I want to get out of my head. So rather than blabbering some random thoughts in air and making yourself look like a total fool I think its better to put your thoughts into words. 

Wonder how long it has been since I last wrote, guess more than an year. Every time I make these pledges of being regular and everytime I end up breaking them only to take new ones. Any ways one of the major roadblocks in my blogging campaign has always been my inability to sit for long and type in front of my pc. Since I have recently got a laptop from office, that excuse has been taken off me and I think I can be a little honest with myself and can start putting some thoughts onto paper.

Again I am hoping against hope that this time I'll be regular. 

Lessons learnt about google chrome today

Itz been whole one day since I started using chrome. I must say  that I find it very attractive basically beacause of the features I mentioned in my last blog today. It being higly responsive. high reading space that it offers and low memory footprint. 

One thing I noticed and I am pretty sure a lot of others must have had is, while chrome is running if you check the windows task manager you can see quiet a few processes running with the name chrome. My first reaction was, WOW, smart startegy from google. So this is the way they prevent the browser from crashing even if a single tab crashes. From what I have understood and have convinced myself to be the fact is, that each tab in crome runs as a separate process. Now this has  a lot of obvious and not so obvious advantages. 

a) As stated earlier each tab is a separate process and hence it crashing of one tab dowsn't affect the browser itself. 

b) With each process having itz own memory footprint and being independent of other,  one chrome process getting slow or getting stuck doesn't affect teh other. So a person will never notice the browser getting slo though there might be a few tabs that might be using a lot of memory and being not responsive. This is all my interpretation of multiple chrome processes running. I am not sure if it is true or not. 

c) Now considering that I am right, it means the amount of memory used by chrome will keep increasing with the number of tabs, which is true for firefox too. So ultimately firefox and chrome will show similar results when stree tested. 

d)One nice feature of chrome that I noticed today is, in case the page is not available any more in the current location, chrome offers you to see the last cached shot of the page as taken by google.

I am still not sure if the multiple processes represent no of tabs open in chrome, but there is s.th the way google is handling the load on chrome by using separate processes. 

Thats it for now. Will keep posting in case I am able to find s.th new. 

Google Chrome - Is it really a killer browser??

I read about chrome 2 days back in tech crunch and my first reaction was - Do we need another browser. I am a die hard fan of firefox and felt really sad on reading about chrome. a) Because google is main fund provider for firefox R&D , so now obviously with chrome the amount of money pumped into firefox will be cut b) as it is a product from google so I am expecting quality, which means serious competition to firefox, and that saddens me. Still I hope firefox to come out with flying colors and make itself better as we have some serious competition now. 

I gave chrome a try and here are some features I liked :

1) Pretty light. I guess primarily because it lacks add ons. But even if I keep the add ons out of picture this definitely is the browser with the fastest response time. 

2) No non-sense browser. Few things you note when you start the browser is the amout of space that is taken by all the bars (menu, task and bla bla). It is minimal. I guess this will change with add ons but right now the browser oftens so much viewing space,though some of it is taken away when you start a download. But still it is very pleasing to the eye.

3) Giving prime importance to the tabs. Loved this feature. Guess firefox should adopt this feature. 

Besides there are many other features which I am sure have been reviewed in many other forums. But I guess the above  3 are the ones that are pretty evident as soon as you start chrome. 

I think chrome is in very early stages and a lot of development needs to happen for it to get seriously adopted. People using IE might just switch over to chrome but trust me it will take much more than just speed for firefox users. And for that matter I guess firefox needs to srsly decrease the memory footprint in case it wants to take on chrome.

I will try to review more of chrome, but I am still not convinced that we needed another browser. I guess it is just going to be a nightmare for web developers now, trying to develop browser compatible apps. 

Anyways I am pretty sure chrome is first step from google in its startegy to integrate its various apps. I am sure in near future we can expect integaration of google docs, picasa, you tube, orkut, calendar and various such google apps with this browser.