Akash Mohan's Weblog

Mobile, Analytics, Social and Cloud… The four pillars of future world

akashmohan — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:01:24 +0000

Things are getting pretty interesting these days. With Smartphone revolution, people have now got super computing power literally at their fingertips. Nobody no longer needs to go to login into PC to surf the web or create a doc or that matter send an email. With cloud now slowly integrating with the mobile, we now have a medium to virtually unlimited storage and computing power with mobile becoming more of frontend device. People first worried about the limited computing power in the mobile but now with cloud its no more a problem. Enterprises have now understood the power of mobile and are now fast adapting the mobile.

Another technology storm, in my opnion, around the corner is NFC ( Near Field Communication). With Android’s v4.0 specifically having this as one of its new elements, the revolution is yet to begin. Picture this, I could have NFC enabled mobile and allow my basic information made public. Just like how I have created my facebook profile, I make a NFC profile. This profile keeps emitting information anywhere I go. The NFC devices in a retail store would capture this emissions and could present me personalised offers for me. Or do demand analysis in the cloud backend and provide me a pop up for a product I am interested in. There are immense applications as a result of this technology. This could be an amalgamation of mobile, analytics, social and cloud. Voila!

Gmail’s Attach reminder

akashmohan — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:51:19 +0000

Today I was sending my team an e-mail using Gmail. The body contained the text ” I am attaching the”. I had by mistake clicked on the send button and gmail pops me a dialog box “Please attach a file” because I had specified the words “I am attaching the file”.

Pretty much impressed by the features provided by Gmail thus reducing mistakes committed by the email senders.

SVN In Ubuntu

akashmohan — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:27:37 +0000

2 days back I was struggling with finding a way to installing an SVN cllient in ubuntu 10.4. I was quiet stupid for not having looked the software updates section and went hunting in the forest for a client and jumped into a number of issues. Had a lot of dependencies to resolves. Finally the apple from heaven struck my head to peep into Software Updates only to find a SVN Workbench. It had all that I wanted.

Case study : Online Shopping cart UML Diagrams

akashmohan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:45:26 +0000

View this document on Scribd

Swine flu brings me home….

akashmohan — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:25:42 +0000

Pune is heavily infected with the H1N1 virus with scores of people getting infected by this dreaded virus. Such was the panic it created that government shut down schools, colleges, malls, theaters in pune till August 23. Though, SCIT is located far away from the city we too had to close down for the same period. Suddenly there was a jubilant mood that gripped our campus so much that our reading room was buzzing with people booking tickets back home. I too booked my tickets by a Neeta Volvo to Goa. The journey as usual was horrible. Add to the misery, I had to wear a mask throughout the journey. But coming back home made me forget the trouble taken.

Leading with rivals

akashmohan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:28:34 +0000

To lead from front is not a mettle that everyone possesses. There is a combination of qualities that goes into becoming a great leader. Be it in politics or in corporate world, the rules are the same. CBS anchor Katie Couric had once asked Mr. Barack Obama if he was to take a book with him besides the Bible to the White House then what it would be. He replied “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin which portrays President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War.

Lincoln’s strategy was to create a team composed of rivals. Team of those people who are unafraid of taking issues with him and are confident of their leadership abilities. Given a situation, this team would argue among themselves and bring out all the aspects of this situation. Thus coming to an optimised solution to the problem. Sometimes the team would just be arguing and may not reach a consensus. It is then when the leader should enforce upon the right decision. To quote an example of Similar leadership followed by Franklin Roosevelt who brought together the three of rival nations like France, Britain and Russia to form the allied movement respite difference in politics which ultimately lead to many breakthroughs in war as well as many other areas like technology, Strategy and many more in a mission critical goal of defeating the axis nations.

A leader should be able to listen to others suggestions. It is necessary that the team feels that they are being heard. It generates a feeling among the team members that they too are contributing towards the decision making process. It is important that a leader must be able to share the credit for success as well shoulder the blames for failures on part of the team. This would help building a closer bond with team. Leaders should also have strong emotional intelligence. They should accept the mistakes made and strive not to commit them again. A leader needs to find some free time for relaxation to get ones mind and body in sync. A leader should also find time to reflect what he/she has been doing the whole day.

back to college

akashmohan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:21:07 +0000

Here I am at Symbiosis center for Information Technology after a 23 month stint at Persistent Systems, Goa. Carrying with loads of good experiences with I entered this college with new expectations. But the transition was difficult. From a guy who just coded and used to get paid to a student who has to complete assignments and presentations stretching to late 2am.

Water Water everywhere but not a single drop to drink

akashmohan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:25:35 +0000

Today on World water day, we should be asking ourselves this question: “How much of water have I wasted during my lifetime?”

Water is the most important component of our lives. And how much we do misuse it. Our earth is composed of 71% of water of which only 3 % is non-saline. This small amount is composed of glaciers, underground water and surface water. The current situation proves the saying, “Water Water everywhere but not a single drop to drink”, so right. Today I read a column in Times of India regarding the ticking bomb on which we all are sitting on, and this is nothing but the issue of water scarcity. There are apprehensions that one day a time would come when wars could be fought in name of water.

The increasing rate of development and industrialization are the main factors that results in pollution of surface water and depletion of our underground water reserve. Add to it the Global Warming that is melting the glaciers in the north and south poles. We are slowing losing our forest cover thanks to our exploding urban population and industrialization. The annual season cycle is also been changing over the few years. Having said all this, does it mean that we have no options left and we stand as onlookers doing nothing. No, and we shouldn’t be doing that.

Each one of us is responsible for the mess that we are creating. So it becomes inevitable that we restore nature to its lost beauty. Small efforts from each one of us could add on this huge task. Agreed that a few individuals doing their bit would not help. But each one of us could influence others around us in adopting practices that would help in this cause. One individual educating other two individuals, those two educating another four and so on would help in creating widespread awareness in the society.

I have now decided that :
I would not waste even a single drop of water and use it judiciously.
I would now close the tap properly and ensure that it is not leaking. The article that I read says that a dripping tap could waste as much much as 60 litres per day or 1800 liters per month.
I would not leave the tap open when I brush my teeth or shave.
In addition to this, also take steps that would curb global warming. Simple steps like switching off the lights/fans when not in use. Switching off my computer when not in use. Printing pages only when desperately required. Switching to reading e-books on screen rather than printing them out. Not use hand dryers. Taking water from the dispenser only what is required.

Besides these steps at the individual level, there is a lot that needs to be done at the governmental level. Like ensuring the factories/industries do not discharge the effluents into rivers or any other water bodies. Water pollution of our water bodies must be checked. Drive to clean our polluted river like for e.g. Yamuna must be undertaken on a war footing.

There are many small steps of this kind that we must follow to help conserve water and make it available to our future generations. Another important step would be to educate people around us on this environmental issues so that we ensure that our children would have clean potable water to drink.

“Cloud Computing”….What’s that???

akashmohan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:46:09 +0000

Well, for the past few days I have been engaged in learning some basics in Cloud Computing, which is a fast growing buzz word in the software industry these days. I am quiet impressed by the case studies that Amazon.com has provided on its website describing ways in which many start-ups have benefited from using cloud computing services provided by them. I have now decided that if I think of having my start – up (God alone knows when…) then it would be surely hosted on Amazon.com simply because I would saved a lot of money that would have normally spent on maintenence costs, buying physical hardware and lot more.

For example, with the help third party tools like rightscale together with amazon web service I would never have to worry about scaling my application when it would become popular(one day Hopefully ) ….It would be automatically taken care by RightScale as it monitors my applications and would alert me as soon as my application receives a threshold number of requests. This is because as soon as my application receives say from 20 hits on one day to potential 2000 hits on another day my application running on one machine may not be able to service all those 2000 request in one go. Therefore, common sense tells me inorder to keep my “popular” website alive (up and running) I have to deploy the application on say 5 machines and accordingly share the load among these machines. I would then duplicate my application on these 5 machines, add a load balancer that would balance the load among these machines.

Sounds good … is this all that cloud computing provides…Answer is “No”. There are thousands of pages written on this subject. Cloud Compting can be seen as combination of one or many systems working seamlessy wih each other which consists of IaaS,PaaS and SaaS. Google has come out with Google Apps (PaaS – Platform as a Service), Amazon.com,GoGrid,3Tera are major players in IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service) and we have Salesforce (SaaS – Software as a Service).

I think of a system combining all these in one platform and offering all these technologies as a whole would be a potential million dollar treasure.

There is a lot more to research on this…