Save your Planet with simple steps

We all ought to adopt long-term life style changes (like using less water, driving fewer miles, etc), but you can do in few minutes to save our planet without leaving your chair.

• Stop junk mail. We know about “Do Not Call” list - but there is no such list for junk mail. However, you can sign up with DMAchoice.org to eliminate up to 80% of junk mail sent to your home. The trees will thank you, and it takes only a minute.
• Asking for the Petition of expanded public transit. Benefits of expanded public transit - including a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and decreased dependence on foreign oil. Signing this petition takes only few seconds.
• Map public transportation routes online. From home to work place, web can provide step-by-step directions for using subways, street cars and bus routes! All the schedule and station information is built in. Drive less and live more by mapping out your work and travel routes.
• “Greenify” your computer in less than one minute. Go to your “Control Panel” (Mac users should access “System Preferences”) and switch your desktop or laptop to a “power save” setting. Modify your preferences so that your computer automatically goes into a low power or sleep mood when idle.
• Realize that one person can make a difference. The average person will generate 52 tons of garbage by age 75, uses 24 barrels of oil a year and goes through 4,836 gallons of fresh water a month. In zero seconds, you can understand the impact that you have on this planet and your ability to make a difference.

State of Outsourcing in 2009

Phil Fersht, a Research Director at AMR Research, and his team surveyed a number of enterprise level and midmarket companies to make predictions about the state of outsourcing in 2009 and 2010. In the report, the team analyzed the drivers and inhibitors of these companies, such as for which services these businesses would likely begin, increase, decrease, or keep unchanged their outsourcing spends. Take a look at the numbers and the trends. From what we’ve seen, is there anywhere you feel they are particularly on or off base?
Visit: http://www.amrresearch.com/Content/View.aspx?compURI=tcm:7-46183

Warming up with OSGi and its importance of Modularity

Started warming up myself for next level of programming with Modularity using OSGi core specifications. OSGi stands for Open Services Gateway initiative. The new OSGi R4 core specification really provides few advantages over it’s earlier releases. Providers who support OSGi today include Eclipse Equinox, Apache Felix, Newton, Knopflerfish, and OXSA.

I feel Eclipse IDE is the best example of OSGi implementation and it’s advantages. After started working with Eclipse PDE i really feel the importance of OSGi framework. The framework defines an application development lifecycle management model, a service registry, an execution environment and modules. As per Wikipedia, OSGi Framework is a module system for Java that implements a complete and dynamic component model, something that does not exist in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot; management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail. Life cycle management is done via APIs which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect the addition of new services, or the removal of services, and adapt accordingly.

If you can start developing plug-in using Eclipse PDE you can very well understand the importance and advantage of OSGi framework. In Eclipse terminology “plug-in” is nothing but “bundles” (OSGi terminology). After reading enough articles and blogs about OSGi i still see OSGi is an example of SOA. And there are many questions remain open in front of us for distributed computing with OSGi. Explore more with the below reference links on OSGi,

1. http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/
2. http://felix.apache.org/site/index.html

CICS Queues

Queues are sequential storage facilities, generally transitory in nature because of the dynamic nature of transaction processing. They are typically used to process requests or to pass data from one transaction to another . For example, data produced as part of a transaction is usually not printed until well after its task has been completed; the data waits in a queue for the print program to process it when there is no more urgent work to be done.

A queue is a sequence of data elements identified by a symbolic name. Each element contains record-oriented data of a type specific to the application that is to process it. Elements of different types can be placed in the same queue. For the general type of queue, transactions add (enqueue) elements to the tail of the queue and remove (dequeue) elements from the head of the queue in a first-in first-out (FIFO) manner. Each element must be read sequentially and when read is removed from the queue. Queues support multiple simultaneous requests to enqueue and dequeue elements, growing and shrinking in size according to the volume of requests. A transaction can requeue
elements to another queue for alternative processing.

You can use some queues differently; for example, as a common scratchpad of elements to be written, updated, read, and deleted by any transactions. You can also dequeue elements in a different order from the order in which they were enqueued. Before a queue can be used, you must define it. For example, a queue definition is used by CICS to identify the symbolic name and type of a queue, and to define the queue to the appropriate queue manager.

CICS supports the following types of queues:

• Transient data queues
• Temporary storage queues

Transient data queues provide the general queue functions. Temporary storage queues are typically used for shared reading, writing, and updating by multiple transactions; for example, as a scratchpad for shared data. Application programs can write, read, and delete data in a transient data queues, but cannot update such data. CICS provides the following types of transient data queues:

• Intrapartition transient data destinations
• Extrapartition transient data destinations
• Indirect destinations

Temporary storage queues are typically used for shared reading, writing, and updating of data by multiple transactions; for example, as a scratchpad for shared data. Also temporary storage queues can be used to store data either in main storage of the operating system, or in auxiliary storage on a direct-access storage device. Generally, main storage is used if small amounts of data are needed for short periods of time; auxiliary storage is used if data
is to be kept for long periods of time. Transactions can write, update, read, and delete data in a temporary storage queue any number of times until the queue is deleted.

Source : IBM Public Documents

Aveen (Technology COE )

Finding Fun in daily tasks

One of the most interesting books we've read in our childhood was about Tom Sawyer and his adventures. And in this book, among all the funny things there was also a moment when Tom had to paint the fence and he wasn't very happy about it. At the beginning he complained and nobody wanted to help him, but after a while he changed his attitude and started to be excited about painting the fence. Then all his friends wanted to do it too and they helped him. The main idea about all this is that it's very important to know how to present a certain task to the others in order to make them want to do it.

In a project it's esentially to mantain the team spirit high and to make people be enthusiastic about their jobs. It is known that people always work harder and give better results when they work for pleasure than when they work because they have to. And one of the secrets for a succesfull project is to combine the tasks with the pleasure of making them. You should keep in mind that it's not hard at all to share enthusiasm with the other team members. You just have to see the good sides of each task instead of the bad ones... You simply have to remember that every litle thing you do means another experience and teaches you something new about the world or about yorself.

So, just try to say "I like this" next time when you'll feel it. Like this the others will hear you and we'll get a bit of your enthusiasm and the project will work better. After all, isn't this what you want?!
Source -Internet

- Nandini (PMO Center of Excellence)

Willing to make Waves?

This year at Google IO (Google Annual Developer Conference) besides handing out Android powered Hutch G1 phone to all the attendees, Google announced - Google WAVE, a new way to look at collaborative computing. Also around it was the 3P concept - Product, Platform and Protocol. The platform and protocol are intended to open sourced, to allow developers to independently build "Wave" platforms and also communicate with other "Wave" systems. This was another surprize for Google IO attendees this year and yeah, I don't think they were disappointed.

Google Wave has been built by the same team who brought Google Maps and associated API to the world. It is built using Google Web Toolkit and HTML 5.0. The demos at Google IO, included its usage on Google Chrome (isn't that obvious...Duh!), Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Hmm... I see there is a big browser player missing out here. (Internet Explorer, of course). Though Google Wave is capable of communicate with existing systems like Twitter and Orkut... the most impressive feature was its extensibilty through "robots". They held best of that lot for the last. I was blown away by Rossy... built in collaboration with Google Research.

Here is the You Tube! video, you NEED to watch.



URLS of Interest:

• Product: http://wave.google.com


• Platform: http://code.google.com/apis/wave


• Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org

Unfortuately all I did was look at the You Tube! videos about this platform/developer preview and regret not being there... :(

As with every new fangled thing with Google (like the GMail), the subscription to Google Wave platform is limited. Offered only to people who attended Google IO 2009 (A point emphaisized by Lars - Product Manager for Google Wave - not once, not twice but many a times during the presentation... Dang!) and of course, you stand in line and apply for an account on the preview website.

Retail Industry – A Quick Look

With a quick look let’s see some of the key trends in consumer behavior and the retail industry in recent times. Three deepening trends in Consumer Behavior:

Customers are becoming more demanding – Due to the Web revolution consumers started sharing their opinion/thought through the forum. It makes them much more demanding and expects more out of a product.

Social Media online is exploding – It is becoming a key vehicle for both strategic marketing and customer engagement.

Premium products and services still sell well and Green is becoming iconic – Many of the less price sensitive consumers are still highly style and status conscious, and consumers are going to increasingly great lengths to boycott brands that have poor eco-credentials

These are the consumer trends impacting the Retail Industry. So, now the question is how about the Retail Industry in general?

Three deepening Trends in the Retail Industry:

The credit crunch is getting worse – It negatively impacting retailer profits.

The e-channel is still growing fast – Online spending increasing very fast and tendency of consumer is leaning towards e-channel. Retailers are expecting a major shift to online as well as oppose to the store.

The leaders are merging channels – and providing seamless brand and customer experiences across them all. Consumers in return are becoming rapidly less tolerant of pricing, availability or service differentials online and offline.