Cloud of Books

Some days ago I had described how I had generated a list of the most popular books and movies among the people who are at a maximum distance of 2 from me on Google's social-networking website - Orkut. Well, I just hacked a Perl script to generate the following cloud containing the names of the most popular books.

atlas shrugged catch 22 catcher in the rye da vinci code doctors five point someone fountain head freedom at midnight god of small things gone with the wind harry potter series inscrutable americans kane and abel lord of the rings lotr love story made in japan midnight's children siddhartha the alchemist the class the godfather to kill a mocking bird 

The cloud contains sorted names of the books, and names of the more popular books appear larger than others. Each of the names in the cloud is a link and when clicked would start an Amazon keyword search for that book.

Cloud of Movies

While, we are at it, here is a cloud of the movies that are most popular among the same set of people at Orkut.

a beautiful mind american beauty anand black braveheart 
casablanca dch ddlj dil chahta hai forrest gump gladiator godfather golmaal 
lagaan life is beautiful lotr matrix 
notting hill saving private ryan shawshank redemption sholay shrek 
titanic usual suspects 

I feel that it would be great to have such a feature at Orkut itself. What do you think?

Ambition

Was reading Justin Frankel's blog post that he wrote a little while after quiting Nullsoft (acquired by AOL), and the following paragraph really struck a chord with me:

[...] but I do still want to create things. I guess the trick is denying yourself ambition (which seems to find its way to you, regrettably), and to just make shit for the sake of making it. Not because you think it'll be big, not because it's "what you're doing next", but rather, because it's interesting. To you. Whether or not anybody else cares, is their business.

These days he is building Jesusonic.

Employee Hackathons

Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on non-core projects which might lead to future gains for Google. While the idea is interesting, but not many employers would be comfortable with letting their engineers run wild for that much time. So, people behind Atlassian and those behind Jotspot adopted a modification to the idea.

The idea is to have a Hackathlon - a day long event where the engineers each crank on something:

• valuable to the company
• but not what they’re supposed to be working on and
• that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day

By having such an event, not only do you have an opportunity to see exciting, and potentially useful ideas being developed, but most importantly you prevent the creativity from being stalled.

Check out Jotspot Hackathalon and Atlassian's FedEx day.

The Long Tail of Software

Vrikodhara made me read Chris Anderson's article on the Long Tail a while ago. Joe Kraus now describes the concept of the long tail with emphasis on software. He starts off with search statistics on Excite, and says that:

while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day.

My aha moment in the article occurred while reading the following paragraph:

The market doesn’t like a vacuum and people do solve their software needs in the long tail. They do it using two basic tools: Microsoft Excel and email. I’ve seen so many business that run on Excel+email. People build structured lists in Excel and then send them out over email for comments and updates – a list of people to hire, a list of deals they want to do with action items included, a list of features for the next product.

While normal users don’t think of it this way, what they’re really building is an long-tail application – a custom application, built by the end user and networked over email.

The article is a must read!

High Performance SQL Joins

Stumbled upon this article which contains useful notes for writing high performance SQL joins.

What if Bill Gates worked for Apple?

Was reading Paul Graham's new essay entitled Hiring is Obsolete, in which he encourages undergrads to create startups. Well, towards the ending he says:

The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn't have been better for him.

Better for all of us? Ha :-)

Networked Emoticon Device

This thing is a networked emoticon device. You log onto it through the Internet and let your other significant at home know if something at work or at school has made you happy, sad, upset, etc. [...] The devices are connected to the Internet through an Xport controlled by a Microchip that handles the basic communications. A series of switches reciprocally activate four LEDs that light the transparent emoticons. Either device is accessible on the web through its proprietary IP address meaning it could also be reached from a web page or through a cell phone.

I think this can also be used at work and could provide a nice way for me to communicate my emotions to my manager. Well, actually if you think of it, my manager could have one such device for each of his reports. Woah! That would be way too cool! :)