I attended Innovations 2008 (5-6th Jan 2008). An event organized by IIT Bombay Alumni association’s Pune chapter.The day started with Anand Deshpande talking about his ideas why product start-ups are not that successful in India and why are we not able to produce world class products.

The important points that he pointed out were we are weak in identifying product market space, product marketing and managing distribution channels.

He also referred to some good examples from the book Blue Ocean Strategy by W Chan Kim

This was followed by the talk from the keynote speaker for the event, Dr. R.A.Mashelkar. I was pleasantly surprised to know the contribution of Dr. Mashelkar in the field of innovation and there can be a separate blog just on that
He talked about some very interesting aspects of innovation and suggested that in Indian context innovation needs to happen at three different levels which is poor, middle class and rich. And there needs to be different strategies and different vision for each category of innovation to reach the correct segment.

One thing that really touched me was when he said this. ” I am sure India will definitely be an economic and technical superpower, what we also need to make sure is that we are super power in ethics and moral and guide the world with us. We need to think of the poor across the world and not just India and that will make true Indian super power”.

This followed by a session of show casing innovations. Interesting session where we saw innovations from various categories ranging from chemical, mechanical, bio-medicine, IT etc.

Well organized and discipline sessions was a pleasure to watch particularly in India.

I also got a glimpse of IIT way of starting and ending a function. The function began with singing a National Anthem (everybody actually sung it and no playback) and ending with something called Pasaydaan , which was unique and I would wish any Indian function should follow.

Barcamps are indeed a wonderful way to connect,share,communicate and socialize. The following post might be a little controversial,however believe me the intension’s are really very positive.

Having attended certain barcamps, I had a few observations. I am not sure if other friends of mine also had similar observations.

• The initial few hours are barcamps are very popular and full of energy. The enthusiasm levels starts dipping after the lunch hours and by around the end of the camp, the last few sessions attract very little crowd.
• Barcamps are getting popular, however my personal view is that the popularity somehow seems to be restricted to a set of audiences and not reaching the entire mass. Again there are pros and cons to this point as well. However one of the significant con to this is that the diversity in topics and speakers might be effected after some times.
• Barcamps being totally democratic, there is no control over anything, be it quality of speakers, quality of presentations and anything else for that matter. Democracy is always welcomed. However this might have an impact in such a way that if there are lets say 3-4 presentations in a row which are targeted to a totally different set of audience then the one present, the interest in the rest of the presentations might have an impact even though they might really be genuine.

I again want to reinforce that the intention of this article/blog is to get the best of ideas for making things better and it does not in any form negating the idea of barcamps or its present form.

It would be great if people can open up their minds and throw up comments for making barcamps even more effective and more and more impressive form of communication.

This is part-I in this series and I would wish to add more to this after the initial comments that I receive for this article.

-H

Belgium generally requires you to have a work permit or evidence that your employer has applied for one on your behalf before you can apply for a residence permit or long-stay visa.

There are three types of work permit in Belgium:

A C permit is valid for only one year, allowing the holder to work for multiple employers. This is usually issued to migrant agricultural or domestic workers. C permits generally aren’t renewable.

A B permit is valid for one employer and runs for one year, after which it can be renewed (by the same employer, usually for the same job or job classification). If you change employers, your new employer must apply for a new B permit. You may find that you have to return to your home country and re-apply for a residence visa before you can start your new job! Once you’ve renewed a B permit four or more times, i.e. have lived and worked in Belgium for five years on the same permit, you can receive an unlimited A permit.

An A permit allows you to work for any employer in Belgium for an unlimited period of time. These permits are issued only to the following categories of applicant: the spouse of an A permit holder, the non-EU spouse of a Belgian national, the non-EU spouse of an EU national legally resident in Belgium, and any foreigner with five years’ uninterrupted (legal) residency in Belgium.

The B permit is the standard form of work permit for most foreigners. Applying for a B permit is the responsibility of the employer wishing to hire a non-EU foreigner. You must give your potential employer a certificate of health and three passport-size photos, which he then submits along with a copy of the proposed employment contract to the Ministry of Labour. Before issuing the work permit, the Ministry of Labour must determine that there’s no Belgian or other EU national who can fill the position and they may send the employer candidates for the job from their lists of Belgians drawing unemployment benefit. (In the case of managerial positions, the permit is usually granted with little or no question.) It can take up to 12 weeks for a B permit to be granted.

Self-employed professionals from outside the EU must apply for a professional card (carte professionale/beroepskaart) in order to work in Belgium. A professional card can be issued for a period of five years. You’ll need a passport, medical certificate and a police certificate (certificat de bonne vie et moeurs/bewijs van goed gedrag en zeden) in addition to proof of your qualifications in your profession. Be sure to check with a Belgian embassy or consulate in your home country, as some professions require specific proof that you’re already established in your field. For example, to qualify for a professional card as a journalist, you must produce press credentials and be eligible for a Belgian national press card; to qualify as a freelance writer, you’ll need to submit copies of published works and evidence of your income from freelancing over the past few years.

Pasted from <https://www.xing.com/app/forum?op=showarticles&id=5945367&articleid=5945367>

I was looking into the details of rss today. Until now I know that RSS is used for sharing your blogs and a lot of other things. However not all was aligned and I was not getting an end to end idea of what exactly this is and how it works. So here it is from what I learnt today.
RSS is a xml reprensentation of your data in a typical format. There is no specified standard that RSS follows however RSS 1.0 version used W3C RCD standard.

So lets say you have a plain web page or any kind of document. If you manually convert that document or web page into an XML document with specified syntax, you have the RSS ready. Also there are RSSCreators which are available in the market which will help you generate RSS out of your non-rss content. If you dont want any RSSCreator it is also possible to create our own RSS manually as well. RSS Validators are also available which will validate the generated RSS feed.

Once you have a rss feed, anybody can take this feed and see the contents. Oh what a big deal. They can very well see the contents of my web page as well. Rite :-). However the good part of RSS is that, somebody who is interested in your content, can subscribe to your rss feed. We shall discuss methods of subscription later in this article.
Once somebody subscribes the rss feed, whenever you update the content for this feed, the subscriber will see the updated content automatically and they need not re-visit your site every one hour to check whether there is any update. So this is more of a push technology in that respect where the data will come to you instead of you going to data.

The automatic update of RSS feeds is thanks to RSS aggregators. RSS aggregators are programs which will watch out for the feeds that you subscribed and send you the updated content for those feed.

Coming back to subscriptions, so if you see any RSS content, it will have this icon <icon here> which says, subscribe to this feed. If you click on that it will ask you to choose on your favourite RSS readers where it can subscribe you. Also there is an e-mail subscription option which will send an e-mail everytime any content is updated on that rss feed.

RSS Discovery is finding out feed from the content. Let’s say your web page has n RSS feeds. Using RSS Discovery, you can get the exact xml corresponding to rss which you could subscribe to. Most of the online aggregators these days have the RSS discovery mechanism in built so that if you provide them the URL, it will fetch the appropriate RSS and you can select the RSS to subscribe.
I found an interesting article about RSS Discovery concepts here.

While browsing through RSS contents, I also came across a term OPML again related to RSS. OPML stands for Outline processor markup language ( I dont know where this markup language business is to extend :-)). OPML file lists all the RSS feeds into one. This helps in importing/exporting rss feeds acrosss aggregators. Also it is used by aggregators themselves to exchange feeds. Online OPML managers are also available to manage your OPML files.

7-7-7 for me was a day at Bar camp. The camp was hosted at Persistent systems. Being a part of the organizers, I planned to reach there at around 9. Although early showers in the morning delayed my plans and was there at around 9:30. Things had already started moving. The registrations had begun and the campers (participants) were enjoying early morning “Poha” with “chai”. It was good to see people praising your campus and canteen and everything.

The sessions started at 10:30. It was good to see that all the 3 tracks were almost packed before 10. I went and attended throughtworks presentation on “Fractuals and Complexity”. I really wondered before the session what is this guy suppose to talk about since I did not have any head or tail of the topic. But that was one thing that attracted me to attend the session and I enjoyed it. The theme behind the session that everything that nature designs is not complexity but rather simplicity. The trick is to figure out the applied algorithm which could may be iterative or repetive and they could really create complex structures. It was good to see people and companies exploring such mathematical and different ideas.

I also heard that TVGuide.in session which was running in parallel to this track was also an innovative concept and the teams had fun interacting with the speaker.

The next presentation by Adaitya Thatte about microsoft’s silverlight product was also informative. Meanwhile I also had discussions regarding the new co-operative IT concept with Ajay. This was again and interesting thing, which co-incidentently I was also thinking about sometimes before.

It was lunch time by then and we had a delicious lunch in Vinod and Priyanka’s company.

There was yet again an interesting session regarding “How to open start-ups in US, UK and India” by Rohas from Techturis. Rohas talked about some really interesting tricks and points which only a lawyer can think and analyze.

We had freeman talking about “Open source education” after that. Freeman discussed about the open source communities initiatives in reaching to masses with quality training through. I found this concept also catchy and would definitely like to contribute to the same. I also had a talk with Puja from marketwala.com meanwhile where she talked about how marketwala operates and interesting revenue models.

Anand from persistent also presented his idea of BLogger which was really an application in itself. Seems like he is triggering the semantic web concept and taking it to production :-).

Had a good time with the organizers too. All of them Kiran, Jatinder, Atul, Rohit11 (yes this is what his name is and we had a good debate on this :-)) all of us had interesting discussions and information sharing.

I would say, Barcamppune3 was a hit…..Enjoyed the day.

Hey All,

The bar camp fever continues. Let us get wet with bubbling new technology discussions along with drizzling rains at persistent, pune.

The topics seems to be interesting and I am sure all of us will have fun as always.

See you there.

I got a new external drive for my laptop this weekend. I just connected the drive to the laptop using the USB port and windows XP recognized the seagate external hard drive. This was good to observe. However after that I was not able to view any new drive created. I wonder how would I transfer my data onto the disk now. I spent sometime over it and managed to do that. I thought it would be useful for other folks to avoid spending that extra time. So I thought of listing down the steps required. Here you go..

Once you see that the drive is identified by the OS, and you can see icon in your system tray which says external device selected,

• GO to My Computer
• Right click on My Computer
• Go to Manage Tab
• Go to disk management
• You can now see the added external disk partition available witout anything.
• Just right click inside that partition space and say “mount”.
• This will change the status for the external disk to “basic” and “online”.
• Then once you have mounted the drive, again right click and say format.
• Once you format the drive it will ask you for the drive letter and once the formatting is done your drive would be visible for use.

Enjoy more space

Hi All,

Look at this amazing new computing technique “Surface Computing” by Microsoft.

http://www.surface.com

Some of the useful utility software’s that really helped me when needed are :

1. Free Undelete

• Web:-http://officerecovery.com/freeundelete/
• Description:-In case of accidental deletion of files on a NTFS (used by default in Windows XP, 2000 and NT), FAT32 or FAT16 file systems FreeUndelete is the utility to help.

2. Easy Cleaner

• Web:-http://www.toniarts.com
• Description:-Easy to use registry cleaner. It was a freeware when I downloaded. However now you might have to pay the initial fees for accessing products on the site.

3. cygwin
Web:-www.cygwin.com
Description:-If you need to use unix commands over windows, a really nice utility.

Rest still to come….

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2004/10/22/obfuscation.html

http://www.javaworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x_java.cgi