Google today launched much its much awaited phone Nexus One. Although it is very less on memory 4GB vs iPhone 16B, the TCO (total cost of ownership) is less than for 2 years.  One should also not over look the fact that this is 3rd generation iPhone which has improved a lot over its predecessor and this is Google’s first attempt into handset.

Apple has a huge community and fan base which are not going to give on it so it is to be seen who controls the market

Mashable has a very good comparison and difference between Nexus One , Droid and iPhone

Nexus One vs Droid vs iPhone

For those who live in New England or in and around Boston , here is a chance to learn about Spring 3.0 and its Spring Tc Server. There is a presentation on Thursday Jan 14 organized by NEJUG (New engalnd Java Group) at Sun Microsystem in Burlington.

The presentation would be done by Tom McCuch who is a Sr. Sales Engineer at SpringSource

Presentation Overview

Spring Framework is the core of the Spring group of projects, the popular and ubiquitous open-source platform used by more than half of the organizations building and deploying Java applications. Spring adds value at development and runtime by providing a platform which allows programs to be coded using a “Plain-Java” programming model, with much increased portability, testability, and agility (ability to evolve) compared to traditional approaches. Read more…

Are you aware of this scam going on social networks and various other sites where in they ask you to take a quiz to compare your IQ with Miley Cirus or take a personality test . The user take the quiz  and at the end is asked to enter his/her phone number to see the results.

Most of the unsuspecting users just give their phone numbers without reading the fine print.In the fine print is the clause that you are agreeing to a charge of $9.99 being applied to your phone account on recurring basis.  Once you enter the phone number and say yes, you get to see the results of quiz and an additional charge of $9.99 in your bill which you might miss.  The parents of the teen age kid might dismiss this is some extra charge on kids phone and continue to pay unsuspectingly. Read more…

Skill-Guru was started with the intent to create and share your knowledge with the community.  Most of the time we take help from forums , sites and blogs when we are stuck in problem so I thought let there be a site where users can create tests based on their learning and share with others.  I had taken my first certification in year 2000 and next one on year 2004 and had to run around  to look for mock tests.

At that time never heard of brain dump . But these days this is one of the most serached term. “Brain dump for Java certifcation” , “brain  dump for microsoft ” , “brain dump for CCNA” etc.

So what exactly is the brain dump ? Read more…

Google Analytic is the default freeware tool for monitoring the website traffic . It has also been used effectively to measure the traffic of blog. I have been wondering if there are any tools to monitor the twitter statistics. With twitter comes a typical problem that those users may or may not come to your site. So how do you monitor the effectiveness of twitter. Some tools for twitter are

• Twitter Analyzer – Did not find much usage except that it gives a graph of how much tweets you have done
• twitalyzer – Provides Influence,  Signal , Generosity, Trend , Velocity of your twitter account
• Klout -  I am not going to write much about clout because Avinash Kauushik has given a very detailed explanation on Klout in this post twitter quantitative qualitative analysis.

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Virtualization has been a buzzword for me, until recently I stumbled across it and gave it a serious thought. I thought about sharing my experiences in this blog.

To start with we had some issues on our linux hosted webserver and had to do some sanity checks by duping it, on somewhat a similar kernel. The usual system resource crunch and the nagging system admins put me on a no mans land.

Left with no options, I decided to do some checks using ubuntu kernel. Remember I still have my notebook (windows XP) to try stuff on, I could have easily partitioned and installed ubuntu with windows and done my job. But probably I was more inclined to virtualization and thought of trying it out. I did some groundwork and came up with options like Sun Microsystems Virtual Box, VMware, virtual pc etc to name a few. Read more…

Virtualizing your IT infrastructure lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of your existing assets.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

1.Get more out of your existing resources: Pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model with server consolidation.

2.Reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure and improving your server to admin ratio: Fewer servers and related IT hardware means reduced real estate and reduced power and cooling requirements. Better management tools let you improve your server to admin ratio so personnel requirements are reduced as well.

3.Increase availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity: Securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service. Eliminate planned downtime and recover immediately from unplanned issues.

4.Gain operational flexibility: Respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.

5.Improve desktop manageability and security: Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer.

Here is an example how to Virtualize windows XP

For a webiste , climbing high on Alexa and getting a Google Page rank is very important.  PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is.

I will share my experiences of trying to get a page rank for our site Skill-Guru.

Skill-Guru domain is less than a year old [as of Nov 2009] and the site was officially launched in July 2009. The early  days were slow as  our initial source of traffic was from referral sites. We started building content added practice tests and invited other to create the tests. Read more…

Google yesterday announcing the Chrome OS , it has done what no other company has done before, it gave a challenge to Microsoft in its core business of operating system. Apple has been a dominant player and has been making inroads , but they never designed and distributed their systems for low end population.

With 7 second bootup time , the chrome OS would be nothing but a OS for a browser to run. Sure when everything has move dot web , it makes sense to focus energy and efforts towards web based applications. And they would be targeting under $200 netbooks.

And here is the smartest move form google. They did not build and OS from start and inherit all the complexities and headaches with it.  The way Apple has target high end masses , Chrome OS would be targeting low end machines.

Microsoft when trying to challenge Google and Apple in Search engine and Music player , clashes head on. Instead of finding a niche or trying to do thing differently , it duplicates the exact same functions. And they think with their cash reserves , they can do anything what they want. Some people learn the lesson hard way.

How Chrome OS would change the game , has to be been but the battle lines have been drawn.

And the winner would be … Consumer!!

Are you jealous ? Yes I have the invite and can invite 8 more people to google wave. Do you want the invite ?

Add your name and email in comments below and I will send you one