Some useful applications for ur ANDROID in xperia ...

Good Morning gaonwalo..
seems m getting addicted to this android thing (naya naya josh hai :P), so i'll talk & talk & talk bout this thing in my posts... (hi hi hi...)

today i'll list some useful applications for ur android...lets start with the coolest thing i found..

• Google Gesture Search: after installing this i've forgot to go to menus to launch applications, uber cool app with real time search results from ur mobile contents..
• Bollywooodji: let me tell u first m a big bollywood fan (read AC) ....i went to see "tere bin laden" instead of Avatar (u can say height of crazyness)...... excellent collection of all masala from bollywood... after this u wont even miss "--" (put whatever ur thinking rite now :p ) of our bollywood hotties........ (
• Mass Text Personalizer: m a message freak....i sms a lot and love to annoy frnds with dhem.......well, android don't have inbuilt feature to send group smses, u need to install an app 4 dat...and i found this one very useful, neat & adds free... :) , u can make groups, send mass messages and keep track of ur log also..
• Astro File Manager: for peopel who love to be organised ....its a must one...since u need to keep track of folder on ur sdcard as well as the inbuild storage, which keeps (atleast) ur mind organised about your data and content.....
• Blutooth File Transfer: there is a sad news about android 1.6, it doesnt support file transfre over bluetooth....but good news is that we've an excellent app to do this, u can browse, download, send etc....means can do ny stuffs u ever wanted (wait....other than "that" stuffs) with your bluetooth device...
• Process Manager: jst like windows task manager.......useful if u want to save your battery, gives detailed info about each process/running-app/services etc, u can kill them to save memory......
• Documents to go: to view microsoft office files......
• Open Sudoku: i personaly like to play sudoku in free times......its a nice app which gives three types of input methods.....with aound 90 puzzle......best thing is that it gets installed into your memorycard...more puzzles can be downloaded from internet........

dats it for now.......'ll keep updating it....... :)

Xperia X10 mini Pro: My Review

Hello friends,
This is my first post in this blog and I will start with the review of my new phone. First let me tell you "Android" is a great OS and i really loved it. I was planning to buy a Nokia C6, but m happy with the final decision.

Although there are some issues with the phone...still u cant have all the great things at a time... :)

Whenever u get a gadget u always compare with the ones which u've previously used, and in order u end up with missing things.....so first I'll show the darker side of the phone...means the difficulties m facing..

Here are the few observations for first four days...

• Incoming call photo display is very small. It would have been better if it was full screen.

• There is a delay in zoom activation

• No video calling.

• Battery backup is poor (some say u can increase it with some tweaks, still its a big issue)

• Voice dialler is not good.

• Unorganised/unnecessary folders in SDCard. Seems they don't follow any pattern to organize file/folders. Different apps are creating their own folders.

• Default applications (which comes installed with phone) cannot be uninstalled. :(

• No option to hide or delete icons from menu..SO it keep on growing with no of applications.

dats it for now.....will write the good part in my next post.. :)

Cordys: The Translator of Information Technology

Hello Again,

From past few days I was  busy like hell (yeah, you heard it right :-) ) with one of the ESB projects. Of course that's not the point I want to make here, am a bit serious today, as always :-).
Just wanted to take out whole lot of things which have eaten my mind in past one month. Okay lets come to the point:

We are living in a world where language no more mean "Hindi" , "English" or "German", in this era of technology language has a broader meaning and "Java" , "C" and many more language and their different versions are in the market. Let me ask you a simple question:

What if a German Boy has to send/receive a message to/from a Hindu Pandit in Varanasi?? or say
What if a "COBOL System" has to send/receive a message to/from a "Java System"??

Yeah, you are right in both the cases we need a "Translator", for the former case it will be a Human, but for the later one it has to be some other "IT System". So, now we know that we need one, what should be the qualities of a Translator so that it can efficiently perform its job??  I've listed down few of the qualities which it should have and will try to make a very simple analogy between the "Human Translator" and a "Technical Translator".

1. Knowledge of Source as well as Target:

Imagine a Telugu Guy speaking to a North Indian guy. Can they both interact and  understand each other ?? What if a guy who knows both Telugu & Hindi comes and let them talk to only him every time they want to say something to each other.

Translator should know the Syntax & Protocol followed by Source as well as the Target Systems in order to understand what's their Input and what's their Output.  Knowing alone is not sufficient, it should be able to adapt to a change at source or target very quickly.

Cordys has a very good ESB layer which understands and can interact with various systems (link)
Apart from the inbuilt so called connectors, it gives flexibility to create your own connectors easily.

2. Preserve the Originality of the Source System:

How do you feel when you watch "Harry Potter" in Hindi? :-)
Additionally we must have heard  that the books which are getting translated to a different language looses its original meaning. What if the guy who did the dubbing or translation not only knows the grammar and syntax but understands the meaning of source language and is able to produce the same meaning in the target language??

Translator should be able to understand the business value of source data while reading and preserve it while writing to the target system. In order to do so, it should be capable to "manipulate the source data", "implement business logic", "add missing information" and also "remove extra information which is not required by the target system" to the source data so that the same business value can be produced in the target system  It should not loose the meaning in the process of translation. 

"Cordys Rule Engine" along with the "WsApp Framework" gives an excellent facility to embed business logic  into any source or target system. (link)


3. Quick Response and Flexibility to work online/offline:

What if the subtitle coming in your french movie, gets delayed by few seconds?? Will you be able to understand what is going on in the movie?? or If you've to wait for the subtitle to come every time someone says something in the movie??

Translator should be quick and give responses in time, it should not take long to process the request and convert it into the target language, as it may happen that by the time it translates the source system, target system has moved ahead of the process. Additionally, it should be capable of running the conversion process in the back-end (batch) so that, process in the front does not get disturb and could run uninterrupted without having bothered about the translation process.

Cordys has a quite good batch job framework which runs in the background without interrupting the main process. Also with correct design decisions

4. Conversation log and Insights into the conversation to improve future communication:

Wouldn't it be better if your VLC Media player auto detects the movie file and can suggest the subtitle automatically?? More, if it can provide you the subtitles based on your interest or your last 5 seen movies??

So far, we've only discussed as if the translator is a dumb system which can follow rules and gives a predefined set of output, but the need of time is to get insights of the interactions between the two systems and improve the communication w.r.t. the "Response Time", "Quality of Data", "Change management". So, a translator should be capable of maintaining the inflow and outflow of data, do analysis of the same & present it in an understandable format.

Cordys has "Business Activity Monitoring" framework which can be used to provide insights into the process execution. (link) Also, fusions charts are another good option to provide the dashboards. (link)

Installing Cordys BOP4.1 & BOP4.2 both in One Machine

Overview:

As BOP4.2 is released many of us would like to install both the versions simultaneously on a single machine. The problem is BOP4.2 runs on Java7 while BOP4.1 runs on Java6, and at a single point of time only one JRE has to be defaulted. (Although we can install both the JDK/JRE in any machine simultaneously). This writeup will enable you to run either BOP4.2 or BOP4.1 at any point of time, you still cannot run both the versions simultaneously.

Steps to Install:

Assuming BOP4.1 is already installed on the machine with Java6, I will proceed with installation of BOP4.2 and related components the next steps.

1. Stop All the existing cordys services in your machine.

2. Download Java7 (32 or 64 bit as per your machine)

3. Install the same (do not choose to upgrade the existing java installation instead install in a different folder). The java control panel should look something like this

As soon as you install Java7 in your machine there will be some registry entries made, screenshot is given below:

The current version attribute of "Java Development Kit" and "Java Runtime Environment" will be changed to 1.7 instead of 1.6. (And ofcourse your Cordys BOP4.1 will stop running :-) )

Let it be like this and dont change anything here.

4. Download and install BOP4.2 (take care of 32bit or 64 bit) in your machine. [I hope no other issue comes in the installation and it is perfectly smooth (which is least likely :-) )](A restart of the machine is preferable after you do this)

At this point of time your BOP4.2 will be running perfectly fine but BOP4.1 will stop running.

Now to run BOP4.1 again all you've to do is to change the "Current Version" attribut of "Java Development Kit" and "Java Runtime Environment" to 1.6 again and start the BOP4.1 services from windows services console. 

IT Industry, Top to Bottom

Its been around one and half year that I am working with a company which deals in Enterprise Application or specifically I would say BPM. What I learnt about the IT Industry is that it can never exists alone, IT exists because business needs it. And in any business IT is implemented broadly at three levels. The basic idea here is to segregate the need for IT and how applications has been evolved one after another resulting from the demand for better and efficient business strategy and competition.
These days I am hearing a lot about the process and tools present in IT Industry. Though I don't have much exposure of tools other than BPM (or I should specifically say "Cordys"), here I would try to explain the different layers of Enterprise Applications which are currently in the market.

Data Storage
The First Layer is applications which are used to store data or which were used to support users to store and retrieve data easily. Data is the king for any business. You need to store all the relevant/irrelevant data generated on a day to day basis. This can be from your client or generated internally due to the different processes in the business model. The very first use of IT hence is to store all data. I would call this process as "Data ware Housing". Databases are used for the same but there are simple applications build over these for users to easily upload, retrieve data. e.g. of such systems can be P400 over IBM-DB2. Though there is basic logic involved in these system but they were not able to manage users activity and a big part of these are manual.

Process Establishment
As the business grew it was not the data which was difficult to manage, but the people involved and the complexity of process which demanded attention. Then a new layer was introduced in business to manage & streamline the ongoing process and introduce new process (when required, factors involved competition, client friendly, change in regulations etc ) . Applications over the existing system or new applications were built to address this issue. This particular layer is called Business Process Management. Tools involved IBM Websphere, Cordys etc.

Process Analysis & Business Intelligence
Once the process has been established,streamlined and managed successfully there was a need for betterment of the process. To analyse the same and make business more efficient and competitive. For this, existing system/process needs to be revised and relevant data has to be picked up. Various tools has been introduced to pick data in different forms. Logics has been developed in order to differentiate the relevant and irrelevant entities of a business. And a different kind of IT applications were developed which gave only analytics support to business and helped them know the flaw, demerits of their process. This particular layer contains the Analysis, reporting and presentation of the data in the best suitable form. So that managers can take better decisions. Tools involved are SAP Business Objects, BI+,

Top two layers are clubbed with each other and called Business Intelligence tools.

"Google Plus" First Look

Finally Google has come up with something new. Here is my first impression about the product.

Main Features:

• Circles: No more Friend Request, Its all about anyone to everyone. Removed the concept of friend requests from social networking sites. but how? when u add someone to your circle a notification is sent to the user, no approval needed if someone can add any person in his circle or not.
• Sparks: Sharing became easy, its all about what u Google  :) .Generally we share things which we come across on internet, Google has enabled us to get those interesting stuffs rite inside g+, and share them instantly. We don't have to login or give authorization to different websites of our profile to share stuffs as posts. Basically sharing news stories, links has became easier 
• Hangout: Group Chat at its best, its all about putting your social life on internet but more lively. Enhanced features of group chat with video chat and youtube video sharing has certainly put the whole social life on internet.

Small but excellent features:

• Share someone else's post i.e. re-share. Missing in Facebook
• Grouping of notifications
• Getting post from people who've added me in their circle, even if i don't know them (can be annoying at a later stage, but u can stop this in settings), these posts are nothing but the posts shared publicly by people who've added you in their circle
• Incoming stream: people who've explicitly share a post  with you or with a circle in which your added.

All other features are more or less same as other social networking sites, the only difference is in ease of sharing and uploading data from different sources. But Google plus has still a long way to go. Some of the very common features missing from google+ are

Missing Features:

• Fan Page: I don't see any option to create a business/celebrity/campaign page or basically fan page in Google+
• Group  feature is missing as of now
• Questions/Polls: 
• Messages: This can be fulfilled by email feature (currently there is no option to send email to anyone)
• Events: 
• Applications
• Integration with other social networking sites

I personally loved spark thing the most. I can read news feeds of my Google reader directly here and share with people right away. Finally a good post on Circle algebra : link 

Google (revenue) model of Android OS

Yesterday we were hanging out at my place and suddenly one of my friend asked a simple question. What is there for google in this Android thing? What is the revenue model of Android OS. Is Google doing it just for charity?

One thing of which I was sure was that it cannot be just for charity. There must be something big. And then Google's advertising model came into my mind. But I disagreed with myself immediately since it looked like a joke to me (as i am naive in these discussions). How can a massive project like Android be feeded with only one source of income. I Googled a bit and was surprised to see that there is no clearly defined revenue model for Android, but my observation was almost right, though there are other means of earning but primary was advertisement only. Let me now explain it in detail. Google could be earning from mainly two/three sources:

• Mobile Advertisement Platform: Why an Internet search company was getting into the mobile operating system business? The answer is hidden into the question itself. Since Google was a search company it is trying to increase traffic on google search so that they can sell it to advertisers which are glad to pay if there business/product is reaching more customers. Thus we can easily say that Android was purchased by google to ensure a growth trajectory for Google's mobile search advertising efforts. And the idea is working exactly as they had imagined: Google mobile searches grew 130 percent in third quarter of 2010 (Link).According to Rosenberg (SVP of Product Management at Google) "mobile search queries have grown five times over the past couple of years. And recently Android is fueling this". and according to Eric Schmidt "Revenue is large enough to pay for all of the Android activities and a whole bunch more."  
• Android Market: Another source of revenue is the default application store for android OS "Android Market Place". Although Google can face some competition from other apps store vendors (like Amazon) in future. But right now google is filling its pocket from applications listed on Android Market and is earning money as transaction fees on buying an application through Google's checkout billing mechanism. (Link)
• Sharing revenue with Carriers & Handset makers: This might be a good source of income for Google as they can share ad revenue with Android supported device manufacturers when they include google's native apps like gmail,maps,talk etc in their platform. Although Google denies from this revenue model it is still a mystry (Link). 

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.png