Do What Matters

If you are looking for foreclosure properties, you don't need to pay for subscription to the foreclosure listing services like realtytrac or foreclosure.com instead you can use simple google search as below: go to http://maps.google.com right after Search maps button, click Show Search options link select Real Estate from the drop down list Enter any address or zip code in the search box and click search maps You can narrow down the search results by Listing Type, bedrooms, bathrooms or area. Note that you do not get the House# for foreclosure listing, you only see street name. Do not get discouraged, it is very easy to find out real address with Property# by just looking for the street at zillow map. Here is what you do: search for street name along with zip code in zillow search select Home search Tab and zoom in to street view You will see all homes and its zestimate  Now you just have to try to match the bed, bath and square footage parameters to one in foreclosure list...

Martin Allen, a seasoned Defense software engineering professional pointed out in his recent article  published in the  Crosstalk   magazine the importance of recognizing the most important assets for any software design and development organization. He is asking the organization to adhere to his following 7 rules for successful outcome of any project (Please read the complete article here ): Rule 1: The main causal factors of project success, mediocrity, or failure should be recognized as human and organizational, not technological. Rule 2: Professionalism and software engineering competence should be assessed objectively and encouraged proactively by senior management. Rule 3: The number and seniority of software professionals employed within an organization should be commensurate with the magnitude and criticality of the required software systems. Rule 4: Organizations should provide an environment condu...

We all depend on google searches more than food and shelter (starbucks provides both wireless and shelter :-) However, finding right information quickly within your search context is the key. Learning, how to smartly and effectively use google search can make you productive at work, specially in the part of world where internet usage at work is limited and strictly monitored. Here is a list of 5 tips which certainly will make you productive and smart as far as finding right information is concerned: Google Definition: -  If you are trying to find definition of a word in a specific context, use the search keyword prefixed with define. So if you need to see definition of "abstraction" in programming language context, type keyword "define abstraction" in search bar. You will see the definition in different context including what you are looking for Searching for Abbreviated terminology: - If you need to know what does RMA stands for, don't use just RMA in searc...

A German software maker ClaimMS brings an online tool you can use to create and annotate the sketch of your car accident by just dragging and dropping objects from the rich pallets. Adding text captions with arrows can easily explain what happened in the accident. The site is called accidentsketch.com Give it a try. The demo is in German language and website doesn't run in chrome. You have to use firefox, i am yet to try google translator on the site for demo translation. Give it a try ...

I am a big fan of gmail and most of the people I know use gmail as their primary web email. I have been  regularly monitoring my gmail storage usage given by google and wondering, can I use the allocated storage for storing and sharing big documents and photos. On our Saturday family visit to local library, I grabbed the famous book Google Hacks and started reading over the weekend. I found 2 useful tricks and tips from the book that I would like to share with you and also add one more that I grabbed from the gmail help page while researching some of the gmail capabilities. Using gmail filesystem as Hard drive in your windows "My Computer" -  Individual gmail user get seven and half gigabyte of email storage which is pretty huge. So far, after many years of usage, I have barely used 9% of the storage. Gmail drive is a shell namespace extension program which maps the gmailFS to your windows drive. Its a cool legitimate software utility, which has not been blocked by google...

Apple TV could not create any buzz with non-apple fans. Google TV probably will. Its coming in 2 flavors to our living room: As an appliance box which can simply connect to most of existing digital TVs  In new TVs being launched by Sony and others. 

Zephyr , a Freemont, CA based company that builds Test management tools for QA team was selected as Gartner's Cool vendors 2010 in Application Development category. So why zephyr is cool? Its cool because: Unlike other test management tools, zephyr offers a complete suite of tools to manage and reuse Test Artifacts within and across projects.  It has a browser based rich UI for productive user experience  Offers SAS version on Amazon EC2 cloud platform Integrates with many bug external tools like bugzilla and others and also through API If you are a QA engineer or a QA manager, you know the challenges in managing the team, plans, documents, testcases, in a shared repository and it can be worth looking at the cool video that zephyr provides at its website

There are many businesses that operate on the principle of Cost Volume Profit (CVP) analysis and Social web is taking that concept to a new level. The true power of volume buying or "Group" buying is being realized by web based marketeer such as Groupon.com  and you can see consumer is winning here. Take an example of today's Deal at groupon - Tony Hsieh's new book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose for $10 if it reaches a certain amount of buyers. So, if the deal looks attractive to you, you tend to advertise yourself(referred as crowd sourcing) using your social network like Facebook and Twitter to convince more and more people to come and buy that product so that deal remains valid. Groupon is not the only one doing this, a bunch of websites are using the concept of crowd buying. Here are some notable ones: groupon.com Livingsocial.com Socialbuy.com Scoopst.com

A lot of bad PR for facebook recently. Its drawing a lot of protests on the privacy issues that are raised after it introduced new feature where non-facebook website posts views on facebook users without their consent. Well, 4 smart and young talented programmers from NYU are taking a challenge to build an open source collaboration platform which will give users control of their own data while enjoying facebook like collaboration.  Right now, these 4 boys are raising money on Kickstarter (as of May 13, they have already raised $124,085) and promising to build the software over summer. Diaspora as claimed on their website -   the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network I have not contributed myself yet, but I think I will and will be watching closely, what the buzz it creates. Will you?

If you are following the trend in social web infrastructure, perhaps the biggest and most significant change that is happening is abandoning of MySQL in favor of NoSQL alrenatives. This is shocking for many people who have been developing highly scalable applications using relation database for many years. Why LAMP is being dumped? MySQL has been the main ingredient of the LAMP architecture and there are several reasons companies are dumping MySQL database for todays application that are heavily write intensive and growing at such a fast speed with no end in sight. These new breeds of applications require data to be partitioned both vertically and horizontally and must be distributed on several nodes across multiple data centers. Relational databases do this at very heavy price. There are many NoSQL alternatives to choose today and here are the major issues, based on which CTO is choosing what to use(they all run on commodity hardware so thats a non-issu...

Who in technology business doesn't know Tim O'Reilly and his empire of $100 million book publishing business (the book with cover featuring animal) Some people however may not know that he is a great visionary and trend setter in the technology world more than an entrepreneur. In May 2010 issue,  Inc Magazine featured a story about him which is very inspiring and will force you to think about his vision and capability to see the future of technology and its impact on everyday's life. So, I started introspecting, how can I think like Tim O'Reilly? Before I go discover that for myself, it is very important to know who Tim O'Reilly really is as a person and what influences his thinking and determination. Of course being a publisher himself, he has read a lot of books and we all know that books have profound impact on one's life. Here are some of the books Mr. O'Reilly himself claimed in one of his article, that has shaped his thinking: The Meaning of Cultur...