When starting with a new project , first question which would come to your mind is which VCS to chose. Given a  lot of options in market like CVS,  SVN ,  Mercurial  and Microsoft VSS  , you have to look at you requirements.

If you are looking for something popular , easy to use , low cost and working with distributed teams, you should go either with CVS or SVN.

Here is quick comparison of various VCS used . This is a result of survey done in 2008 by finalbuilder.

Soucre control surver

Looking at the results, you would surely go with SVN but one should look at why SVN is getting more popular and is taking over CVS.  SVN was created to fix some problems in CVS.   Read more…

We have heard a lot about HTML5 in last couple of weeks. Apple does not want to go with flash technology and are adopting HTML5 as the new standard.  Scribd has ditched flash in favor of HTML5.

Sounds pretty exciting huh !!

So let us dump what we have and start developing in HTML5.

Nope not so fast . Hold on to your hour horses. Yes it is true that HTML5 is becoming the new standard . But at this stage neither all the browsers are ready for HTML5 , nor the clients would be ready with new browsers. So you might have a new website/application built in HTML 5 , using new tags but the clients are still with IE6 !!

You do not want to land in this situation.

Aditya Yadav’s  interview on Info q Deploying HTML 5, talks about some of issues around this new standard and he has put together an excellent table detailing compatibility level of each browser with HTML5 features.

Over 250,000  students take the prestigious CAT exam every year in India . The test was conducted using pencil and paper.  Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in India which conducts CAT had a  $40 million deal to computerize IIM’s Common Admission Test. This deal was bagged by none other than Prometric.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.

Netflix . the online leader in movie rentals had a typical problem at its hand. It wanted a recommendation engine to recommend movies to its users. The problem statement was “To improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.”

They had tried to find a solution to this in house and had spend some time and resources but without much luck. So they they threw this challenge for people  to come together and solve this problem. The grand prize of US$1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which would best Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10% Read more…

For a lot of small business who rely on Google ads to bring them customers , this would not be good news. A report says that only 8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Clicks. This is an update to the comScore highly publicized “Natural Born Clickers” research, conducted two years ago with Starcom USA and Tacoda.

The Complete report can be found at Media Post

Now this data along with other news abut click fraud on face book , would not sound sweet to ears of those who are paying for google adwords or facebook ads. There was another story on techcrunch Facebook Click Fraud 101.

I think the way to combat the problem is performance based ads.  Companies like google and facebook should get paid only if some transaction happens. The banner ads can help in getting brand awareness but this is good for only big companies or those who have big budgets. A small medium to size business is more interested in getting revenues in order to sustain long enough for the brand to be recognized.

The Term JPA- Java Persistence API is also used when referring the Hibernate and we know that the JPA is part of EJB3. Following section gives a brief Idea about the 3 terms and explains how they are related.

Hibernate :

The Object-Oriented Programming is widely used programming techniques to develop any application. Persistence is the basic concept in application development.  Without data saving the applications can do little. The Relational Database Management System is widely used to save/persist  the application specific data. Read more…

Global downturn seems to be taking its toll on all industries. IT industries were also deeply affected by this downturn.

Companies were hoping that recession will end this year therefore most of them honored the offers given to college grads last year.

But looks like they do not have enough work for them. Infosys has doubled the training time for its 18000 freshers which were hired last year. It also assigning them to mock projects in order to give them some real time experience.

While this may not be good enough but at least it is better than sitting idle. This is not good for students  who graduated  this year and are facing a tough time in job market.

Read the complete story here

If somebody would have asked me few days back this question , I would not have known the answer. But I always wanted to find about the technology and tricks used at high performance sites like  twitter , facebook and ebay.

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core of  twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

Iwill be covering more about Scala in next post and how is it more efficient over Java.