Communication channel - shift

I am part few of whatsapp groups and could see how drastically the communities have shifted from other social media to this mobile based social platform.

Earlier, most of the communications were sent via groups on fb. These days looks like the groups in whatsapp are more vibrant and active.
No doubt if we would also see some whatsapp groups created by corporates to harness the potential involved.

The shift in the channels for personal communication:

Snailmail --- Email --- Messenger --- Messengers on social platform --- Messengers on mobiles.

Does that mean that if you are not on WhatsApp/FB, you don't exist!

Looks like virtual social presence is weighted more than a physical presence.

Encapsulation in the physical world @ workstation

Encapsulating (wires and the adapter) to decrease the clutter at workstation :)
The box holds the adapter and the lengthy wire.

How to create custom run commands in Windows

After using Linux for almost 7 years, I had to switch to Windows due to trade reasons.
I remember using windows during my B.Tech days (both win 98 and winXP).
I used to burn the midnight oil researching about Windows, tweaking the windows registry,
installing windows .....
I got too much used to command line in Linux that even after a couple of weeks of using
windows, I tend to press at+f2 ;)
To quench the thirst of using commands, I started to create shortcuts for frequently used
programs so that we can run our own run command.
And thought of sharing this for few might find it useful. Any suggestions are also welcome.

1. Create the shortcut for the program or folder.(Say we are trying to create a command for Mozilla Firefox)
2. Open the run command and type \Windows
3. Paste the shortcut to the Windows folder
4. Rename the shortcut to the command name you want to assign the shortcut to(say firefox).
Now you can type Window+R and type the above assigned command name.

For example: The shortcut to Mozilla Firefox can be renamed to firefox.

And that's it. Typing the command in the run bar will start firefox. :)

Inserting Images in Google Spreadsheet

Inserting Images in Google Spreadsheet.

I was working on collecting icons for various hosts to for display.
Most of the icon extraction part was automated. Since, the icons
reflected directly in the UI, a manual round(minimum 1 round) of intervention had to
take place.
The format was something like this


So far so good. I looked at the spreadsheet shared with me and each time I had to
click on the icon link, go to host and then cross check if this was the correct
mapping.
Hmm! This was tiring.
I wondered if somehow the images directly relfected in the spreadsheet cells.
A quick search revealed that Googledocs already have the provision to insert images
in the cells in various ways(URLs,local machine, picasa web albums etc).

for the image url, just include the formula =Image("url")
And everytime I update a link in the first cell, I see the result in the third cell.

A simple feature saved a lot of my time.


More about it here
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87037

EOF Exception Running Twitbase Examples

I tried running the first example program UsersTool.java and after the following message I get an error message.
zookeeper.ClientCnxn: Session establishment complete on server Inferno/127.0.0.1:2181, sessionid = 0x13ad53b961d0009, negotiated timeout = 40000

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.IOException: Call to Inferno/127.0.0.1:58275 failed on local exception: java.io.EOFException

Though, the package compiles well, I get this runtime exception.

Solution:
HBase starts and runs successfully but the problem is with the connection. After, a bit of delving, I found that this is due to the difference in
versions of HBase used for compiling and running.
So, first check if the version of HBase started and the version of HBase indicated in pom.xml are compatible.
I run hbase 0.90.4 and the version I used in to compile was 0.92.1.

Changing the version in pom.xml to the hbase version running on the system does the trick.

---------------------------------
<dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.hbase</groupId>
      <artifactId>hbase</artifactId>
      <version>0.92.1</version>    <!-- Change this to the version of hbase running on the system)   -->
      <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
          <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        </exclusion>
      </exclusions>
    </dependency>


-------------------------
#No-SQL databases

Yakuake - Useful Terminal Emulator

It has been many days I wrote my laaast post , and here this post about a simple, useful terminal emulator - yakuake.

Of late, I came to know of this terminal Emulator Yakuake (Yet Another Kuake).
If one is frequently switching between a tty and other programs, yakuake would
be of great use. A single press of a key slides down the emulator and then slides it up.
Could be useful for playing media files or playing songs.
The way in which the emulator can be activated with animation effects with a single press looks cool ;)

Profiles can be configured to suit it to our needs.


More about the Emulator here in wikipedia

Linux tools, 

WebFluenz

I came to know about this company from a friend(asking me if I was looking for a change) , who is now
working with Infosys SETLabs.

The work at WebFluenz is quite interesting and I guess many product and service companies can
relate themselves quite well. The idea of bringing in social intelligence is something that seems to
work well. The advent of social networks and the enormous daily/hourly activity is a very big news
source.

Customer relationship, competitor analysis, advertisement planning, trends etc are few things
that they provide. However, it would be an interesting point to see the way WebFluenz uses
semantic search capabilities.

WebFluenz uses NLP, data mining, semantic search algorithms and pattern recognition in
their products. The work on the whole is very interesting and challenging. Working in such
technologies would be an exciting journey.