Saturday, January 26, 2008

Compile hello.c in steps

How ?

hello.c
=======

#include

int
main (void)
{
printf ("Hello, world!\n");
return 0;
}


one way to do : "gcc hello.c "

Lets do it step by step :

cpp hello.c > hello.i

hello.i will have all macros expanded.

gcc -Wall -S hello.i

check for hello.s - yep its assembly language code

as hello.s -o hello.o

Now Object file time, created object file using -o option

now ld time but LD need to have a lot options so lets go for

gcc hello.o

this links and create a.out

run a.out and see "Hello, world!".

too long ?? k just use --save-temps options in gcc, all temp files will be saved

'gcc --save-temps hello.c' and do an ls after :-)

tools for help:

file : identifies the file type and some of its characteristics
nm : shows symbol table
ldd : shows list of shared libraries an executable needs

© yankandpaste®

Thursday, January 24, 2008

DID NASA FIND LIFE ON MARS?


A Photos by NASA's Spirit Rover in late 2007 shows a human-like figure is visible sitting on the rocks.

Wondering why they look like a human and not any other animal :-). But lot of debates going on. Lets finally prove its an illusion or a rock.

According to Hindu mythology, there are 14 worlds. We may find life at least in one of them.



© yankandpaste®

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Cheap hydrogen - escape from fossil

Remembering a talk with my father about airplanes. He was saying in some ancient Hindu books talks about some 14 series of planes and he was talking the book says some kind of plane which uses water and some metal for use as fuel.

The new discovery of cheap hydrogen production says its going to be a water and sunlight + some metal

read : http://www.nanoptek.com/

lets wait and see how its going to be

© yankandpaste®

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Time to buy a Apple tv ?

Was wondering, Is it time to buy Apple TV ?

$2.99 for old movies and $3.99 for new movies.

k let me calculate :

Cost of Apple Tv : $299
Cost of internet : $50 / month
Cost of movie : $15 /month

How much I pay with netflix and i am sure they have good movie collection.

K fine, I understood its high tech, so comes with a cost ( mostly hidden) once i combine more services the cost will be less ). Do i have any other use with Apple Tv ? as a gaming console or so ?

noo, So i cant use.

May be i expect Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo to do movie online business or netflix to start online movie business with one of these people so that i can use my gaming box for movie also, I love to buy one on those than Apple tv or Apple should come up with a gaming console.

© yankandpaste®

Sun has announced a £1bn MySQL deal

Sun is making waves in open source.

with open office : http://www.openoffice.org/
with open sparc : http://www.opensparc.net/
with open solaris: http://opensolaris.org/os/

and now MYSQL ( yep i didn't forget Java )

This is what happens if a person with vision is driving. Hats off to Jonathan Schwartz !!. Running his company and making contributions to world in a different model.


© yankandpaste®

Monday, January 14, 2008

How to recognise a good programmer

How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

I consider myself to be a pretty good programmer. At the same time, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the business side of the fence, filtering technical CVs for projects, interviewing people, etc. Thanks to this, I think I have a bit of experience in recognising good programmers, and I want to share it in this article, in the hope that it may help other “business guys” to recognise good programmers. And, who knows, perhaps some programmers who have the potential to be good but haven’t really exploited this can also read this and realise what they need to do to become good (although, as I’ll argue, that’s definitely not accessible to all programmers!).


In his article The 18 mistakes that kill startups, Paul Graham makes the following point:

“… what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That’s actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can’t tell which are the good programmers. They don’t even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.

In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he’s a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren’t. Then they’re mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.

So how do you pick good programmers if you’re not a programmer? I don’t think there’s an answer. I was about to say you’d have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can’t recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?”

I disagree with Mr Graham on this one. I think there are a number of very strong indicators of a “good programmer” (and, conversely, strong indicators of a “not-so-good programmer”) that even a business guy can recognise. I’ll summarise some key indicators and counter-indicators in a list at the end of the article.

#1 : Passion
In my corporate experience, I met a kind of technical guy I’d never met before: the career programmer. This is a person who’s doing IT because they think it’s a good career. They don’t do any programming in their spare time. They’re shocked when they find out I have a LAN and 3 computers at home. They just do it at work. They don’t learn new stuff unless sent on a training program (or motivated by the need to get a job that requires that technology). They do “programming” as a day job. They don’t really want to talk about it outside of work. When they do, they talk with a distinctive lack of enthusiasm. Basically, they lack passion.

I believe that good developers are always passionate about programming. Good developers would do some programming even if they weren’t being paid for it. Good programmers will have a tendency to talk your ear off about some technical detail of what they’re working on (but while clearly believing, sincerely, that what they’re talking about is really worth talking about). Some people might see that as maladapted social skills (which it is), but if you want to recognise a good developer, this passion for what they’re doing at the expense of social smoothness is a very strong indicator. Can you get this guy to excitedly chat up a technology that he’s using, for a whole half hour, without losing steam? Then you might be onto a winner.

#2 : Self-teaching and love of learning
Programming is the ultimate moving target. Not a year goes by without some new technology robbing an old, established standard blind and changing half the development universe. This is not to say that all good programmers pick up these changes and ride the bleeding edge. However, there’s a class of programmers that will never, ever pick up a new technology unless forced to, because they don’t like learning new stuff. These programmers will typically have learnt programming at university, and expect to get by on whatever skills they picked up there, plus whatever courses their company is willing to send them on.

If you’re thinking of hiring someone as a programmer, and he ever utters the words “I can work with that, just send me on a training course for a week and I’ll be good at it”, don’t hire that guy. A good programmer doesn’t need a training course to learn a new technology. In fact, the great programmer will be the one talking your ear off about a new technology that you haven’t even heard of, explaining to you why you must use it in your business, even if none of your staff knows how to use it. Even if it’s a technology he doesn’t know how to use yet.

#3 : Intelligence
Some business people assume that lack of social tact and lack of intelligence are the same. Actually, intelligence has several facets, and emotional/social intelligence is only one of them. Good programmers aren’t dumb. Ever. In fact, good programmers are usually amongst the smartest people you know. Many of them will actually have pretty good social skills too. The cliché of the programmer who’s incapable of having a conversation is just that - a cliché. I’ve been to a few meetings of the London Ruby User Group and I can say that with only a very few exceptions, most people there are smart, talkative, sociable, have varied interests, etc. You wouldn’t look at them chattering away in the pub and think “what a bunch of geeks!” - at least until you approach a group and realise they’re talking about the best way to design a RESTful application with a heavy UI frontend.

This doesn’t mean that they’ll all feel comfortable in every social context. But it does mean that if the context is comfortable and non-threatening enough, you’ll be able to have as great a conversation with them as you would with the most “socially enabled” people (perhaps better, since most good programmers I know like their conversation to revolve around actually useful topics, rather than just inane banter).

Don’t ever hire a dumb person thinking they’re a good developer. They’re not. If you can’t have a great conversation with them in a relaxed social context, they’re very likely not a good programmer. On the other hand, anyone who’s clearly very smart at the very least has a strong potential to be a good or great programmer.

#4 : Hidden experience
This is correlated with the “Passion” point, but it is such a strong indicator that I’d like to emphasise it with its own point.

I started programming when I was about 9, on a Commodore 64. I then migrated onto the PC, did some Pascal. When I was 14 I wrote a raycasting engine in C and Assembler, spent a large amount of time playing with cool graphic effects that you could get your computer to do by messing directly with the video card. This was what I call my “coccoon stage”. When I entered that stage, I was a mediocre programmer, and lacked the confidence to do anything really complicated. When I finished it, I had gained that confidence. I knew that I could code pretty much anything so long as I put my mind to it.

Has that ever appeared on my CV? Nope.

I strongly believe that most good programmers will have a hidden iceberg or two like this that doesn’t appear on their CV or profile. Something they think isn’t really relevant, because it’s not “proper experience”, but which actually represents an awesome accomplishment. A good question to ask a potential “good programmer” in an interview would be “can you tell me about a personal project - even or especially one that’s completely irrelevant - that you did in your spare time, and that’s not on your CV?” If they can’t (unless their CV is 20 pages long), they’re probably not a good programmer. Even a programmer with an exhaustive CV will have some significant projects that are missing from there.

#5 : Variety of technologies
This one’s pretty simple. Because of the love of learning and toying with new technologies that comes with the package of being a “good programmer”, it’s inevitable that any “good programmer” over the age of 22 will be fluent in a dozen different technologies. They can’t help it. Learning a new technology is one of the most fun things a programmer with any passion can do. So they’ll do it all the time, and accumulate a portfolio of things they’ve “played around with”. They may not be experts at all of them, but all decent programmers will be fluent in a large inventory of unrelated technologies.

That “unrelated” bit is the subtle twist. Every half-decent java programmer will be able to list a set of technologies like “Java, J2EE, Ant, XML, SQL, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, EJB, Shell scripting”, etc.. But those are all part of the same technology stack, all directly related to each other. This is possibly hard to recognise for non-programmers, but it is possible to tell whether their technology stack is varied by talking to them about it, and asking them how the different technologies they know relate to each other. Over-specialisation in a single technology stack is an indicator of a not-so-good programmer.

Finally, if some of those technologies are at the bleeding edge, that’s a good positive indicator. For instance, today (November 2007), knowledge of Merb, Flex, RSpec, HAML, UJS, and many others… Please note that these are fairly closely related technologies, so in a couple of years, someone who knows all these will be equivalent to someone familiar with the Java stack listed in the previous paragraph.

Update: As a clarification to this point, there’s in fact two indicators here: variety and bleeding edge. Those are separate indicators. A good variety of technologies across a period of time is a positive indicator, whether or not the technologies are bleeding edge. And bleeding edge technologies are a positive indicator, whether or not there’s a variety of them.

#6 : Formal qualifications
This is more a of non-indicator than a counter-indicator. The key point to outline here is that formal qualifications don’t mean squat when you’re trying to recognise a good programmer. Many good programmers will have a degree in Computer Science. Many won’t. Certifications, like MCSE or SCJP or the like, don’t mean anything either. These are designed to be accessible and desirable to all. The only thing they indicate is a certain level of knowledge of a technology. They’re safeguards that allow technology recruitment people in large corporations to know “ok, this guy knows java, he’s got a certification to prove it” without having to interview them.

If you’re hiring for a small business, or you need really smart developers for a crack team that will implement agile development in your enterprise, you should disregard most formal qualifications as noise. They really don’t tell you very much about whether the programmer is good. Similarly, disregard age. Some programmers are awesome at 18. Others are awesome at 40. You can’t base your decisions about programmer quality on age (though you might decide to hire people around a certain age to have a better fit in the company; please do note that age discrimination is illegal in most countries!).

As a final note to this, in my experience most average or poor programmers start programming at university, for their Computer Science course. Most good programmers started programming long before, and the degree was just a natural continuation of their hobby. If your potential programmer didn’t do any programming before university, and all his experience starts when she got her first job, she’s probably not a good programmer.


From :http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/

© yankandpaste®

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Tata writes its name in History

$2500 car - is that the only reason for Tata name to be written in History.

read more :

Tata top bidder for Jaguar, Land Rover .

So Jaguar and Land Rover going to in Tata stable.

Is that enough ? nooo, tata makes smart moves on next gen technology. MDI web says "The agreement between Tata Motors and MDI envisages Tata’s supporting further development and refinement of the technology, and its application and licensing for India. "

- About MDI ( the air car company )
MDI is a small, family-controlled company located at Carros, near Nice (Southern France) where Mr. Guy Negre and Mr. Cyril Nègre, together with their technical team, have developed a new engine technology with the purpose of economising energy and respect severe ecological requirements – at competitive costs.

What this means - Tata is all set to be future GM or Toyota



© yankandpaste®

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Comcast introduces open-cable platform

Why its interesting for me ?

I believe the next big stuff for some years is going to be IP - Video - TV stuff.
The IP broadcasting is going to fly from here. Open standards make the game more fair.

I imagine a new level of TV channels who directly broadcast the content over IP on a subscription basis and people watching them in Home TV using IP STB.

May be google kind of web companies will come with a channel search page so that we will browse and choose the program.

What happens to cable/Telco companies ?


They are going to be pipe providers, they will provide data pipe to home. Rest all - what to watch, from where to watch etc the customer decides :-)

Going to be hot ?
Big pipe technologies - Wimax, fiber etc
HD video technologies - Full HD codecs - smarter/faster
Open standards so that every one can have a TV broadcast.
IP STB devices with open interfaces.

why it will take years ? Its a paradigm shift, cable - telcos - tv channels will show change resistance because of the money they already put in these.

© yankandpaste®

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Voip ? Telecom Startups ?

A yank and paste from gigaom , I liked it.


Take This Job And Shove It — Why I Retired From Telecom
Guest Column, Monday, December 24, 2007 at 12:13 PM PT Comments (18)
Written by Brian McConnell

I have been designing phone services and starting phone companies for about 15 years, since I was in college. But I recently retired from telecom, concluding after all this time that it is not a good industry for entrepreneurs, especially those who don’t have access to vast amounts of capital or who don’t want to take on institutional financing.

There was a brief period in the mid-to-late 1990s when garage-based phone companies really were possible. The last remnants of Ma Bell had been deregulated, and there was an explosion of new technologies (VoIP, new switch architectures, the web as a distribution channel, etc). Big companies were disoriented by this, and had little clue as to how to deal with the rapid change. As a result, there were lots of big and small opportunities for startups to exploit new and rapidly growing niches.

Most of the profitable niches in telecom are now gone. Home phone service, long distance, small business phone service, conference calling, mobile — all have become low-margin commodity markets dominated by established companies. The capital costs of prototyping new phone services have declined, but not nearly as much as retail pricing, and hence, the margins are near zero. The liquidity and exit opportunities for small telecom companies are also not good. You either need massive amounts of capital, or you need to be bought by a phone company (the stereotypes about phone companies exist for a reason). There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare.

Mobile should be a huge opportunity for developers, but unless and until the carriers open their platforms and create something like Ad Sense for developers, it’s a rotten business to be in. The mobile operators micromanage application developers, and they do not share revenue freely. They often charge for network access when they should be rewarding you for stimulating usage.

The industry is currently clogged with VoIP services whose main offering is cheap phone service, because as a commodity product the only thing that matters is the price. Services like Jaxtr and Jahjah may get a lot of hype locally, but I don’t see how what they’re doing is all that different from what all those prepaid card vendors have been doing for years. The prices seem about the same, and the prepaid cards work from any phone.

Where does this leave today’s better-known telecom startups? Unfortunately, some combination of distribution problems and consumer apathy will kill most of them. Ooma is a good example. They make an appliance that allows you to make free calls by rerouting calls between their hubs over the Internet.

It sounds neat, but most consumers don’t spend enough time on the phone to make it worth using. For the majority of users, phone service is “cheap enough,” and once a product reaches that threshold, convenience outweighs price – which is the main reason mobile operators can charge a premium for essentially the same product. I think it’s only a matter of time before companies like Metro PCS set the norm with flat-rate pricing for mobile. But then where does that leave VoIP?

There are a few standouts that I think will find success, but these are mostly platform companies that are doing serious R&D. In VoIP, Gizmo is a favorite. I don’t think the economics of Gizmo as a service by itself are great, but they have been steadily developing a broad platform that enables standards-based VoIP on almost any device — not a trivial task. Someone will eventually buy them for their service plus this technology base.

When I compare telecom to the web, the big difference I see is that the web is both a destination and a distribution channel. This really makes it a unique medium. Telephone services, on the other hand, are products that are only loosely coupled to the web, if it all. A cool web site attracts users because it is clever or interesting. A phone service, at the end of the day, is just a dial tone. I think Skype was a hit because it was really a clever instant messaging client that happened to allow free/cheap phone calls. There were many VoIP services before Skype — Delta Three, Net2Phone and Dialpad, to name just a few.

What’s the message in all of this for entrepreneurs? Telecom seems like a great industry. After all, billions of people use cell phones. The problem is that there is nothing like the web for mobile, and by that I mean the entire set of standards and business practices that have grown around it. It’s hard to see this changing significantly in the near future. It’s also important to learn from history. If you’re building a phone product, spend some time on the former site for PhoneZone, the first company I started in California before selling it to Helio Direct in 1999. Some of my favorite products from that time, such as the Internet PhoneJACK (the first low-cost VoIP peripheral) and the Jetstream FrontDesk (great SoHo phone system), are also all long gone.

This is why I decided to quit telecom and focus on completely different projects. I am spending the next several years working on the Worldwide Lexicon, which aims to do for translation what Wikipedia did for encyclopedias. It may or may not turn out to be a good business, but it’s an interesting project, and it’s something new, whereas if I stayed in telecom, I’d be spending the next several years designing more bad IVR systems for banks and airlines.

No thanks.

Orginal link :http://gigaom.com/2007/12/24/take-this-job-and-shove-it-why-i-retired-from-telecom/
© yankandpaste®

Worst of 2007: VoIP

Copyright 2008 by Virgo Publishing.
http://www.newtelephony.com/
By: Kelly M. Teal
Posted on: 12/28/2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


VoIP clearly has moved into the mainstream, but 2007 marked a year of high-profile stumbles that appear to signal the end of standalone IP telephony.

Vonage Holdings Corp.’s tribulations seemed to make headlines more than any other tech company in 2007. The pro-vider in March lost a patent suit to Verizon Communications Inc. and, in September, another to Sprint Nextel Corp. In mid-October, Vonage announced it also was being sued by AT&T Inc. for patent infringement. Through it all, Vonage stock plummeted to its lowest point, the balance sheets still don’t show a profit and CEO Michael Snyder resigned. Given all of that, not to mention the millions Vonage must pay Verizon and Sprint, there’s much conjecture about the future of Vonage. Will a rival buy the company? Will Vonage close up shop? Or will it keep swimming against the tide?

Those questions have yet to be answered. But one thing is clear about 2007: with all incumbent mergers cleared and cable MSOs ramping their VoIP offerings, it was the perfect time for the big guys to fend off standalone VoIP companies such as Vonage, says Infonetics Research analyst Stéphane Téral.

Increasing pressure from larger carriers appears to be one reason why SunRocket Inc. unexpectedly ceased opera-tions in July. The second-largest consumer VoIP provider also had a flawed business plan that worked against it in an age of bundling. The firm bet on a combination of low usage and a rapidly decreasing cost of termination services while pro-moting discounted prepaid annual subscriptions, says Téral. “If you do this, you need to bring in short-term cash at the risk of recurring revenue. And, in addition, you need a very low operating cost structure, which they did not have because SunRocket required users to have SunRocket hardware to access their network,” he says. That added burdensome over-head to SunRocket’s operations. Despite the signs, nearly everyone seemed caught off guard by SunRocket’s sudden closure last summer, another apparent victim of a VoIP gold rush gone sour.

Then, just this fall, there came news that online auction giant eBay Inc. has been unable to make good on its $2.6 bil-lion purchase of Skype Ltd. As a result, the promise of monetizing a free VoIP service looks less likely. That’s not surpris-ing, given that eBay’s logic went against basic Economics and Business 101 principles, Téral says. Skype started as a freebie and “when you start that way, it is impossible or at best extremely difficult to turn free users into paying users.” The real goal was to buy Skype’s large user base “to tap into as a new engine to increase eBay’s user base,” he says. “As it turns out, it did not really work that way.”

If eBay is going to keep Skype, it needs to figure out how to make money off Skype’s 220 million users and get the technology better integrated into auction operations, says Sally Cohen, an IP analyst for Forrester Research Inc. eBay originally wanted to allow users to call one another on the P2P network — potential buyers could ask questions of auc-tioneers, rather than waiting for e-mail responses. That assimilation hasn’t fully materialized.

eBay is trying to remedy its missteps. In October, Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis left their ex-ecutive posts at Skype; this was somewhat expected given that the two had made no secret of their desire to focus on their new Internet TV project, Joost. Now the industry rumor mill says Skype could go mobile, although that presents new challenges of its own (for example, why would users pay extra to connect to a free service when they already pay for cell minutes?).

Turning Skype around will be a struggle. eBay reported a third-quarter 2007 net loss of $936.6 million, or 69 cents per share, due mostly to a $900 million write-down in Skype’s value. That marked eBay’s first quarterly loss since 1999.

Overall, 2007 set the stage for big changes in the VoIP industry. VoIP is no longer an adventure, an opportunity for startups, says Téral. “It’s a serious telephony business taken over by giant telcos. … You can’t stay pure-play forever.”




© yankandpaste®