Browser Tech., JSP library called Prototype.

As an engineer that works for a mobile devices company, sometimes, I feel it is easy to miss some of the web inventions and technology actions. Fortunately for me, I have a sports website where I can tinker with some of the emerging technologies and new ideas on how to put them to good use.

Recently, I saw a demo. of a client-side technology called "prototype". See for yourself on how you can have a window transition from lying dormant in your web page into an user interactable object on the browsing page.


The library claims to take care of cross-compatibility issues across the two browser goliaths, IE and Netscape. However, an interesting test on my Palm PDA that runs the browser Opera-mini couldn't work the magic. All this bodes well for the web based User Interfaces that are likely to become richer and richer. Hopefully we will see some useful widgets coming out soon.

Reader Responses to the Information Explosion Question!

Many an excellent view point was expressed on how people deal with the information explosion. Here are some of those responses, paraphrased,

• People advocate situation appropriate technology use. Anything else leads to disaster.


• People lament the lack of standards and state that the demand for smarter devices will eventually pickup leading to the development of newer technologies and standards.


• There is an answer that warns of excessive dependency on devices and expresses apprehension that eventually devices may take over our lives, if not already.


• Suggestion for categorized knowledgebase is advocated to overcome the raw explosion of Information.


• Privacy concerns as devices get smarter and start to figure out how to help humans. Protection from information gathered going into wrong hands is expressed.

The sheer variety of the thoughts expressed was representative of the enthusiasm from the readers and goes to show, how one can cultivate creative and diverse opinions, by asking the right questions. This topic may well suit those doing requirements gathering, as it emphasizes proper questioning to elicit and gather the right requirements.

Information explosion - are we doomed?

A few weeks back, this question was posted by me to Linked In (social networking site) users.

"The trend is to connect everything, toaster, cell phone, people, pagers, PCs. The grand march is towards making more information available at an average user's finger tips, whether they need it or not. Does this in any way help simplify your life?

I am not against technology, as that would put me out of a job. However, I find it annoying that my phone doesn't understand that I am busy and not taking calls. My car knows that I am speeding, but won't warn me, as it assumes, I know that already. Will these devices ever get smart enough to understand the simple needs of humans? What will it take to move us towards information simplification?

NOTE: Please note that the opinions expressed here are mine and does not in any way represent any company that I may be employed with."

The reader response had many an excellent view point on how people deal with the information explosion and as technologists what can we do about it. Aim to provide a summary in my next post.

Nifty Challenges from Stanford pages.

If you are looking to test your knowledge of different data structures, I recommend checking out Prof. Nick Parlante's Stanford pages, where he has, what he calls a Nifty assignment archive.

Nifty Challenges

The thing you have to like about these assignments is, these are practical, real-world problems. for e.g., "catching Plagiarism in a given set of documents". The target for this solution could easily be a book publishing house that wants to use your progam.

If nothing else, it helps think about the different data structures that you can apply to the problems to resolve them.

Checkout Stanford Prof. Nick Parlante's Javabat.com

If you are an experienced C++ programmer, who is getting to get the hang of Java, like I am, you may want to checkout Stanford Prof. Nick Parlante's www.javabat.com - where you can solve small java problems and instantaneously test and improve your java skills as well.

Linked In

Welcome to my WebZine!

What is a webzine? Perhaps a place to share things technical and make a few new friends.