Searching for Foreclosures made easy - by google

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 listing. There is a good chance that you will know what exact house belongs to the foreclosure listing.

This helps you narrow down your search for foreclosure properties, so that you can drive by the street and then call the listing agent directly and make an appointment to see from inside. Happy searching... if you have better tips, please share by posting comments below.

Assess, utilize and enhance your most important asset - The Human Asset

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 conducive to the intellectual task.
Rule 5: Management should recognize its primary functions are to attract, motivate, facilitate, and retain talent.
Teams should be given an identity, a vision, and quality goals.
Rule 6: Teams should be organized with respect to member strengths and competencies.
Rule 7: Dependable sources of knowledge should be provided in the form of textbooks and training materials.

There are many excellent tips given by Martin here in this article. Each rule can again be broken down into pieces which can serve as guiding principles for the teams involved in the project. My favorite: Team should be given an identity, a vision and quality goals. Whats your thought about these rules?

OLPC $75 Tablet will be coming sooner than planned

5 less known google search techniques that will make you smarter and productive

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:

1. 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
2. Searching for Abbreviated terminology: - If you need to know what does RMA stands for, don't use just RMA in search box, it will return you 10 million results. Instead search for "RMA stands for" and you are guaranteed to get it first result which most popular is Return Merchandise Authorization
3. Searching directory of information: - Google directory allows you to choose specific topic context and search within. You can select "Computers" directory and search for cloud to get cloud computing related directory results. However, if you don't find the right directory to search for, google provides alternative way. You can use keywords like:  "computers intitle: cloud" You will notice the difference in search results and if you still need to narrow down by only University related pages, use "computers intitle: cloud site:edu"
4. Finding phone numbers and addresses: - Google offers reverse phone number lookups for residential and business phone owners. Wireless numbers are not covered. Just type "phonebook: 4087776565" and you will get the owner information. You can also use "phonebook: Name" to get phone number if its landline and owner has not removed permission to not use it.
5. Google Scholarly search: - If you are searching for papers and journals on specific topics, use Google scholar Here you can select to return results from patents as well.  You can click advanced search and select particular state for including court opinions on a topic, pretty powerful.

Other than the search techniques mentioned above you can take a look at Google web search features page where you can customized your search terms in numerous ways and get very precise results. Also I love to use Google Tip of the day Gadget to my iGoogle page. 

Sketch your accident online and free

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 ...

3 useful gmail tricks I did not know/use before

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.

1. 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, so no immediate danger in using it. Here is what you do to add GmailDrive to add to your My Computer:
• Download gmailfs116.zip from one of the download links given on GmailDrive webpage. 
• Unzip it -> Run setup, it will add GmailDrive in your My Computer
• Login with your gmail id and passwd and there you go. You will see empty drive. Create folders, drag and drop your files from your computer and see them immediately appearing in your gmail with subject prefixed with GMAILFS. Have fun and explore your own innovative usage of GmailDrive.
2. Create multiple email addresses our of your single gmail  -  Plus addressing is a feature supported by gmail using which you can create multiple addresses and still  emails sent to those addresses to your primary gmail. Here is how you use it:
• Use plus (+) sign to add a tag to your email name before @. For example, if your gmail is johndoe, you can create one like johndoe+ebay@gmail.com. In fact you can be more descriptive and create one for your ebay seller account johndoe+ebay+seller@gmail.com and one for your ebay buyer account johndoe+ebay+buyer@gmail.com. All these emails are going to come to your regular johndoe@gmail.com address.
• So whats the use? well, the real use is in auto filtering of incoming emails. Lets say, you had to provide your email to sign up for a xyz mailing lists but you don't want the regular emials coming and annoying you everyday. Well, you can use johndoe+xyzmailing@gmail.com and you can easily set an auto filter on xyzmailing to send them to trash. Try it and discover usage, let us know..
3. Add a custom From email address and send mail from gmail server - This is pretty cool, I correspond with few people using my hotmail, but don't want to get the overhead of using multiple email clients. You can setup other emails as From email addresses in your gmail, see this post from gmail.

Hope you had a great weekend !

Smarter TV coming to our living room - soon !

Apple TV could not create any buzz with non-apple fans. Google TV probably will. Its coming in 2 flavors to our living room:

1. As an appliance box which can simply connect to most of existing digital TVs 
2. In new TVs being launched by Sony and others. 

Zephyr - BI solution for QA team

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

Power of Group Buying !

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

Facebook getting competition, soon !

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?

Trends in NoSQL space - what is social web infrastructure using?

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-issue):

• Can linear scaling possible by adding new machines and how easy is to add new machine to the infrastructure?
• Are there any single point of failures? 
• What is the human cost in maintaining the system?
• Does system scale in massive writing?
• What underline technology has been used, is it easy to find people?
• Is there a healthy community around the project?
• how easy it is to rewrite and deploy?

These are the options companies are choosing today to build and port their applications:

1. Cassandra:  originally developed at facebook in early 2008 and later donated to Apache foundation. It is  a distributed database with Google's BigTable like data model that runs on Amazon's Dynamo like web infrastructure. A lot of companies like facebook, Digg, Twitter etc.. uses Cassandra. IBM Research uses Cassandra in BlueRunner; a hosted email service in the cloud infrastructure.
2. HBase: HBase is hadoop database, an open source implementation of Google's BigTable. This is the best article that explains Hbase and BigTable concepts to a newbie. IBM Research has built a distributed text index that leverages the scalable control layer of HBase.
3. MemcacheDB: MemcacheDB uses berkleydb as backend. It is a persistent storage engine for fast and reliable key-value based object storage and retrieval. MemcacheDB - A complete guide is the best resource if you would like to evaluate it.
4. Mongodb: Companies such as shutterfly and sourceforge, the open source repository uses mongoDB. Its a document oriented distributed database which supports full indexing on any attribute. 

Thinking like Tim O'Reilly

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:

1. The Meaning of Culture by John Cowper Powys - Mr. O'Reilly rates this book very high. He consider this book as part of his regular mental toolbox, which has profound effect on him as a person.
2. The Golden Warrior by Hope Muntz - He read this book when he was fourteen and it fired his imagination he claims.
3. The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu; Translated by Witter Bynner 
4. The Palm at the End of the Mind ; Poems and play by Wallace Stevens
5. Introduction to Realistic Philosophy by John Wild - He read this book when he was in high school. Only after reading this book he say, he was convinced that "philosophy was meant to be used, a guide to a better life, not a dry subject rehearsing the thoughts of dead men."
6. Science and sanity by Alfred Korzybski 
7. Rissa Kerguelen: Book One in the Saga of Rissa by F M Busby
8. Dune, by Frank Herbert - Read what he says about this book: "When I got this book out of the library at age 12, my father remarked, "It's sinful that so large a book should be devoted to science fiction." Little was he to know that this book, full of wonderful concepts about how to come to grips with a world out of our control, would play so large a role in his son's life. After I graduated from college, a friend who was editing a series of critical monographs about science fiction asked me if I'd like to write a book about Frank Herbert. I agreed, and it was that choice that set me on the path to becoming a writer. My first book, Frank Herbert, is online at http://tim.oreilly.com/sci-fi/herbert/. In the course of writing the book, I got far deeper into Herbert's ideas than I had reading his books growing up. The core message of all Herbert's work is that we can't control the future, but we can control our response to it, surfing the edge of change and risk."
9. The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

As you can see, there are no technology or business books show up in the list of his core books, however Mr. O'Reilly does have his favorites among technology and business books. He himself has written numerous books on technology. Among his favorites are:

• Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Larry Lessig
• The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
• The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen.
• Built to Last, by James Collins and Jerry Porras
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. - He suggests anyone who wants to start a business with impact to read this books.