I am throwing off my domain name netotto.com and migrating to shuva.in due to multiple reasons. So please update your bookmarks/RSS feeds to reflect shuva.in.

This blog has moved from http://blog.netotto.com/ to http://blog.shuva.in/ .

The RSS feed has migrated from http://blog.netotto.com/rss.php to http://blog.shuva.in/rss.php
The netotto domain will continue to exists till the end of July 2008 as a reflection of http://shuva.in.

The reasons for this migration are:

1. I am bored of NETOTTO. Everytime I tell someone, the impression that goes is that NETOTTO is another site(a never heard of site) where I have hosted a blog.

2. I have realized that I wont be able to host anything in this site that's not related to me in some way or the other. So wanted a more personal name.

3. I realized that the name of the site should mean something to the other person. Anything that does not identify me will not identify the site as my personal site.

4. I found by accident that shuva.in was unclaimed.

5. The world is talking of change. They say change is good. I decided to try it out.





Additional links : Interesting YouTube CEAT videos on CHANGE :

1. Change in refreshing

2. Change is around the corner.

3. Change is unavoidable.

4. There is nothing wrong with change.

Another slang proverb:
People who live in glass houses don't CHANGE with their lights turned on.

Happy Changing.//

The first thing I did today morning was add another RSS feed into my Google Reader. This one is unique as its not about "serious" technology or photography, but comics. Comics from Microsoft? Yes Microsoft launched the HHH comic series today.

Here is one that I like:



Go visit the HHH comic series now or get their RSS feed.

Happy reading.//

Year 1996, when I was on my first year at Engineering college, any word starting with the letter "e-" was the in-thing for the geeks. Guys would flaunt that they have emails with mailcity and hotmail. We never required an address book to remember email ids. Lynx was the de-facto browser then. Ladies were a little slow to pick this trend, after all internet was a geek-thing then.

Browsing the Net and emailing was the best an internet geek could do then. Then over the years chatting took many people by storm. There were many pseudo-geeks who would spends hours just chatting with people whom they didnt know.

Internet groups, mailing lists, e-communities slowly came up to improve this trend of internet socializing. All these had something in common, the platform to involve oneself was owned and provided by some big companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Content was not the USP as was the workflow. There was just very few community that were content rich which again was restricted to the academic-centric people or people developing free software.

Over the last 2-3 years, there started a different style of socializing in the internet which is based on the content more than anything else. Its blogging. And the way it is making itself popular has been beyond the expectation of many people. Who would think that making your diary public would be so popular and at times very addictive. Plus it does not come with all the non-value adding qualities that chat rooms and friends group have. Some people found this as a very good way to make slow money. You no longer need to go to a publisher to give exposure to your writing skills.

Even though many of my friends still dont understand the concept of blogging unless they visit a blog site, its catching up so fast that company recruiters give credit to the candidate's blog -- yes its found a place even in your resume. CEOs of many companies have started taking this style of socializing to communicate with an intended audience. Today's newspaper said that many companies have started to acknowledge blogging as a quality activity in the internet. Two very large Indian outsourcing company Infosys, CTS have even started official blog spaces for their employees internally. Remember that these companies have always objected to employees socializing in the internet. Blogging as I said, comes with many value-added and personality development values. This is because its very transparent and it forces the blog-author to present quality information to its readers making it challenging like no other content publishing idea available in the world today. 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years(as per Blog Expo website).

Speaking of Security is a security blog of my company whose content is maintained by some of the top security analysts today.

Its has become so popular among individuals in every walk in life.

I was pretty much surprised to see that there is now a Blog World Expo to be held at Las Vegas Convention Center on the 8th-9th Nov 2007. Is blogging becoming the new world media?

To give an idea of how much blogging goes on daily:

1. Over 120 thousand blogs are created every day. Of course most of them die after a while, because they were created by an individual's adrenalin rush. Blogging aint easy. Being one of the admins of a Free PhotoBlog Service, Aminus3, I can say that people find it very difficult to maintain the content of their blog flowing on a regular basis.

2. There are 1.4 million blog posts everyday. It can be very very difficult to find the right kind of blog you want to be reading or get connected to. There are software that are designed to specifically keep track of your favorite blogs and alert you when new blogs show up. The ones that I have personally used are (in order of preference):
Attensa, River of News: An add on for you MS Outlook.
Wizz RSS, a Firefox Extension.
Google Reader.

3. 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs. This is a big surprise and a living proof that blog-sphere is the in-thing today.

Happy Blogging!

Resources:
Technorati , Blog tracking portal
BlogCatalog, a directory of blogs.
Photoblogs.org, a blog directory for photo-blogs.

Three months back I had attended a seminar by Intel where they showcased their software solutions targeted primarily towards parallelism. They talked a lot about multi-core CPUs and how we would soon be moving towards that. It was a Developer's forum and one of their products I was pretty impressed with was the Intel Threading Building Box(TBB). TBB is basically a C++ runtime library for multi-core programming which gives you thread libraries, templates and algorithms among other things which are designed for Intel multi-core processors.

Last week while was was doing some reading, I saw that it has become open source -- means it is also available as a open source project under the GNU license. For a developer like me things just cant be better. They gave me a CD with a trial version of the library which has now expired and I never got a chance to have a look. Now I can.

More good new: Popular Linux vendors are now working on to packaging this as part of their distribution.

Cheers!

Resources:
The so claimed not-so-easy-to-find TBB Tutorial: Presentation slides in PDF.