Ashik’s IT Thoughts » Uncategorized

Behind The Cloud by CEO Marc Benioff

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:41:26 +0000

Morning today when I walked into my cube in office, I found a copy of our CEO Marc Beniof’s new book Behind The Cloud at my desk.

I liked the chapter headings and the forward by Michael Dell. Just 2 days earlier a friend of mine forwarded me the article on some top paying fortune companies – http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/107916/how-10-top-paying-companies-stack-up?mod=career-salary_negotiation where salesforce.com is in a pretty good position at number seven!

In this book Marc talks about how in 10 years this company has evolved from a startup to a billion dollar player in the industry.

Amazon Kindle: A Great Gadget

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:49:50 +0000

Amazon Kindle DX

This June 2009 is a special month for gadget lovers. Yesterday Amazon’s Kindle DX was released and 18th of this month Apple’s iPhone 3G S will be released. While I and my wife Shusmita already have our iPhone 3G, I am particularly in favor of Kindle to consider as the best gadget I can ever have.

Amazon’s Kindle DX is an electronic book reader, the third of it’s kind after it’s successful debut in late 2007 with the first generation followed by early this year with second generation also known as Kindle 2. Like I waited for iPhone to mature a little bit before I bought that, I also waited for Kindle platform to mature before I made up my mind to buy the latest generation Kindle (DX).

I love reading books, both in English and in my mother language Bengali. My decision behind buying the new larger size Kindle DX is primarily because it has a native PDF reader and hence I will be able to read Bengali PDF books which I won’t be in the case of Kindle 1 or 2. My only concern is the bigger size of DX makes it less portable. Before coming into this decision I have roamed around the Amazon Kindle discussion forum for a while along with some other online resources. If you look at my facebook news feed or my recent delicious bookmarks (http://delicious.com/ashikuzzaman/Kindle) you can easily guess that I am in Kindle fever. I am expecting a reading habit and experience change once I get my Kindle DX in my hand. I am going to order it 15th of this month and hence I should recieve it in my hand sometime early July. But whatever I have read so far about it, I can’t just wait to recieve it.

I have read (I think pretty extensively) on Sony Reader, Kindle 2 and Kindle DX and decided to go for Kindle DX. Here are my rationale behind my choice -

First, I love Amazon (and also Google) and want to be around them. When it comes to books and reading I consider Amazon the primary authority and expect creative innovations from them(one small example is the idea they came up with accessing the notes and highlights of the books online). I like the vision that Amazon has – to kindlize each and every book ever printed in any language. This pretty much removes Sony or any other non-Amazon platform (despite Google Books efforts) from my choice.

Second, I like the idea of bigger screen size.

Third, I want to read PDF books and documents. I have a good collection of non-english books in PDF formats. The ones I am more interested about are in Bengali language which I am sure Amazon’s PDF conversion program won’t support. So I will need a native PDF reader. This pretty much restricts me to Kindle DX instead of Kindle 2 despite the less portability of DX compared to K2 and Sony Reader.

Fourth, the larger memory 3.3 GB is not a must-have but a good incentive to me as I want to carry a huge library around without ever thinking of removing any of this.

Fifth, the accelerometer in DX is a plus for me.

But if I buy a second copy of Kindle for my wife or my father or brothers, I will buy Kindle 2 for them because of the portability issue.

One more thing I would like to add with interest here. I have published this blog a little earlier as a Kindle Blog available for subscription via Kindle. Amazon has made it so easy and trivial. I will post an entry or two every week to keep myself recorded in words here.

Spectrum and 5 Other Bangladeshi IT Companies are now CMMI Level 3 Certified

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:58:36 +0000

I got an email morning today that Spectrum Engineering Consortium Ltd. (SECL) has been awarded CMMI Level 3 certification recently. I was so happy to read it because I was part of the initial team in SECL that started this effort. It took long, hard 8 years but now they are here. It’s a great achievement for Bangladeshi Software Industry.

I also got to know that DataSoft, Leads, Southtect and IBCS-Primax have also been awarded CMMI Level 3 certificate. Bangladesh Internet Press Limited (BIPL) was the pioneer in Bangladesh Software Industry when they recieved it back in 2007.

All these are so wonderful for Bangladesh Software Industry! This is in recognition of implementing international best practices and process approach in software development process. The more companies join this race, the more overseas clients will gain confidence over Software Industry of Bangladesh. Congratulations to all these IT companies for the giant step forward to showcase their overall capability in a positive manner.

Last November (2008) I worked with Zeeshan Bhai and AABEA to organize a round table session and Cisco Telepresence Demonstration in San Jose with Khandakar Asif Hasan, Director & CTO and Mushfiqur Rahman, Deputy Managing Director of Spectrum Engineering Consortium Ltd. There they mentioned that Spectrum and some other companies are already at the last stage for fulfilling all the necessary requirements for CMMI Level 3 certifications. It’s great to see that it worked well with them.

Reference: http://aabeat.com/forum/index.php?topic=28.0

Google’s Web Browser Chrome

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:20:35 +0000

I started using Google’s new Web Browser Chrome since morning. It looks so good to me so far although I am not going to move away from Firefox pretty soon. First 2 things I noticed are that it doesn’t have a toolbar other than the address bar (nothing like File, Edit etc) and the tabs look very good/clearly distinguishable. Also the browser is so far neutral about Google’s services or adding the Google toolbar by default on it. It’s beta, so it will change a lot in near future…still exploring what’s inside…

JMS

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:30:59 +0000

Background

I, Nitol and Paul are 3 developers who worked at the early times of our career as java developers in a project named SPRINTRE in Bangladesh almost 6 years back. Coincidentally, we all 3 are now in USA. I and Nitol in California and are now neighbours and Paul just came to USA few weeks back and interviewing for openings in New York area. This is a part of a technical discussion going amongst us in JMS that Nitol sent. I am keeping it here finding valuable for reference.

Excerpt From Nitol’s Email

JMS is not mandatory thing, it’s a tool. If it properly used, then it can be useful. It helps to modularize code, improves maintainability …

Scenario

I’m going to describe one scenario from project Spintre, you remember right . When a Purchase Order is approved, it should be saved in the PO table also it should save one record in accounts in proper cost center. How did we implemented it, we had accounts service call in PO module. Means we made PO module dependent on accounts module. Suppose we had a ActivityTracking module, which saves all user activity. How did we implemented it? We would have implemented it by calling activity tracking service. Suppose we have to include notification service also, when ever a PO is approved, purchase officer wants a email in his email box.

Without using JMS

accountService.save(amount, costcenter);

activityTrackingService(userObj, PoModuleIdentifier, ActivityApprove ..);

{

look for who want’s notification, get the email address and send the email.

}

How do you like this code implementation? How is the impression of a User who just clicked on the Approve button and waiting for so many thing to happen.

Those all service can be asynchronous, those activity don’t need to be real time. Now how we can use JMS here

when PO is saved, code block using JMS is

With JMS

{

Event event = new Event(po number, date, Module, ActivityType, user ……)

jmsPublisher.publish(event);

}

Done, clean implementation. But now we can write sevaral Subscriber

AccountModuleSubscriber {

receive(Message obj) {

Event event = (Event) obj;

// save it to correct cost center

}

ActivityTracker {

receive(Message obj) {

Event event = (Event) obj;

// save it log table

}

So, by using JMS you basically improved the application performance, It’s using idle time .. Jms broker will manage these different thread ..

2. I user ActiveMQ. I heard it became a apache project now.

Commercial Weblogic JMS is expensive. Basically all the EJB server has JMS support, Jboss, webspheare ….

3. JMS is a technology, a messaging architechture. It is scalable, if it is used properly. Means if design is good, then it’s scalable .. if design is bad, no meaning of using JMS.

4. You yourself can implement by using thread. But why to re-invent the wheel. JMS gives support of message persistent, redelivery, durability, thread pool .. so many support. Why not use those.

You can also make code moduler by using Observable-Observer pattern, but that is synchronous. You can use thread then, you’ve to maintain them ..

5. JMS is nice technology. Messaging technology is old, java implemented that near 2000. There are big server’s available for messging/message broker from long time back, like IBM MQSeries. Microsoft has there MS MQ implementation into windows may from 10-15 years ago. It’s a proven technology.

My informations can be wrong, anyway I hope it will help.

Salesforce Google Apps Integration

ashikuzzaman — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:30:44 +0000

One of the reason I like working in cutting edge technologies as “On-Demand” CRM in Salesforce.com…

Last week, Tony Ruscoe found an interesting reference to Salesforce in a CSS file used by Google Apps. According to the company, “Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to salesforce.com than any other on-demand CRM company in the world.”

Other people found references to Google products in Salesforce’s applications: a button to compose a message in Gmail and a button for Google Docs, so the integration is probably in the final stages. “Openness is a virtue – the best CRM and the best online productivity suite are lined up for a deep integration”, thinks Steve Andersen.

In June 2007, Google signed a partnership with Salesforce to include Google AdWords in its applications, but Wall Street Journal speculated that the result “could be a Web-based offering that integrates some of Google’s online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, whose customer-relationship management tools help salespeople track their accounts.” Maybe this year Wall Street Journal’s prediction comes true.

Source: Salesforce to Integrate with Google Apps?

GTD: Getting Things Done

ashikuzzaman — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:30:10 +0000

I have read some articles on it on and off last few months and tried a firefox extension of GTD for GMail without success. Today while thinking I have so many works in hand to do both personally and in office, I gave myself an hour’s break to study a little more on GTD.

Getting Things Done

By David Allen

To know what it is, I would rather leave you to the wikipedia entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done than spending my words. All the articles say to read David Allen’s famous book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity at least twice to start with. I don’t have enough patience for that and before I pick that book from Barnes & Nobles tonight, I decided to follow the article below as I use Google Notebook for a while.

http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/getting-things-done-with-google-notebook-256844.php

Lots of authors suggest to start with plain pen and paper instead of heavier GTD tools like ThinkingRock which I may really adopt one day if needed.

I have been using RTM with GMail for last few months inconsistently without actually being aware of GTD. If you choose for this instead of Google Notebook here is a link.

http://the-getting-things-done.blogspot.com/2007/12/gtd-with-google-mail-and-remember-milk.html

Rounding problem in Java for float, double types

ashikuzzaman — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:28:30 +0000

Here is a sample java program that I wrote. It shows that for all of Double, double, Float, float you can’t rely on default rounding operation of java/jvm. I think even JVM to JVM implementation (sun windows jvm vs ibm linux jvm for example) the output may vary. Can someone confirm it?

public class DoubleAndFloatIssue {

public static void main(String[] args) {

Float f1 = new Float(7.0004443556783244696789123456789f);
float f2 = 7.0004443556783244696789123456789f;

Double d1 = new Double(7.0004443556783244696789123456789);
double d2 = 7.0004443556783244696789123456789;

System.out.println(“Float f1 = ” + f1);
System.out.println(“float f2 = ” + f2);

System.out.println(“Double d1 = ” + d1);
System.out.println(“double d2 = ” + d2);

f1 = f1/7;
f2 = f2/7;

d1 = d1/7;
d2 = d2/7;

System.out.println(“Float f1/7 = ” + f1);
System.out.println(“float f2/7 = ” + f2);

System.out.println(“Double d1/7 = ” + d1);
System.out.println(“double d2/7 = ” + d2);

f1 = f1*7;
f2 = f2*7;

d1 = d1*7;
d2 = d2*7;

System.out.println(“Float (f1/7)*7 = ” + f1);
System.out.println(“float (f2/7)*7 = ” + f2);

System.out.println(“Double (d1/7)*7 = ” + d1);
System.out.println(“double (d2/7)*7 = ” + d2);

}

The output of the program is as below:

Float f1 = 7.0004444
float f2 = 7.0004444
Double d1 = 7.000444355678325
double d2 = 7.000444355678325
Float f1/7 = 1.0000635
float f2/7 = 1.0000635
Double d1/7 = 1.0000634793826177
double d2/7 = 1.0000634793826177
Float (f1/7)*7 = 7.000445
float (f2/7)*7 = 7.000445
Double (d1/7)*7 = 7.000444355678324
double (d2/7)*7 = 7.000444355678324

I joined SalesForce.com as a Software Engineer

ashikuzzaman — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:00:36 +0000

I joined Salesforce in San Francisco yesterday as a Software Engineer. So far it has been a wonderful and competitive corporate environment. My manager took me to a Thai Cuisine for lunch and explained me how Salesforce is growing so fast! I will be probably assigned to AppStore and Phoenix projects soon after I finish my admin training next week.

Last Friday (2nd Nov) my Philips colleagues gave me a farewell lunch at Red Kwali in Milpitas. Although Jeff could not attend it and instead gave me a phone call to say good bye; everyone else in Philips Milpitas R&D team joined that – Imtiyaz, Brian, Dan, Jade, David, Tho, Ba, Franca. It was a nice time with them.

Wikistics

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:45:34 +0000

I have been thinking about a statistical data service similar to Wikipedia on the way for a while. We need lot of statistics on different topics and conventional search engines are not good enough to find out statistical data related articles easily. So why not Wikipedia develops a new product Wikistics which is Wikipedia + Statistics.

Do you like the idea?