Rajan's View

View of Austin from South Congress Avenue Earlier this year, my wife and I visited America for the first time. The first pit stop was to meet family and friends in Chicago. Some of my initial impressions were as expected - big roads, bigger cars, even bigger skyscrapers and you get the big picture. No puns there!  And then, we landed in Austin. As soon as stepped into Bergstorm Airport, the first sight that greeted me was the "Keep Austin Weird" t-shirts. Cities often try to project a polished or aspirational side to themselves, and here was a city unabashedly celebrating it's quirkiness. Then, there was the country music blaring in the airport, not some manufactured pop. Austin is known as the 'live music' capital of the world, there are  several live shows daily. I was already warming up to the city. Who says first impressions don't count. Over the next few days, we stayed with family near Round Rock. As we drove around the city and suburbs, ...

Banana Spread Bananas are probably the favourite fruit for most people, I am no exception. I had a few bananas going very ripe, so I had whip up something quickly with them. Here is an easy recipe to make a spread out of bananas. Contributed by  Rajan Manickavasagam . Published  12. July 2012 Ingredients 2 ripe bananas 1 teaspoon cinnamon powder 3 peeled cardamoms 2 tablespoon honey Instructions Remove the seeds from the cardamom pod. Add all the ingredients and mash them using a hand blender. Ensure that the mash has a thick spread like consistency. Refrigerate the spread overnight. The spread can be used as a topping for bread, pancakes, cornflakes, oats or ice cream.  Happy eating. Further details Serves  3-4 people . Preparation time is approximately  5 min . Cooking time is approximately  5 min .

For those who remember the early days of the internet, they will be familiar with the free web hosting sites like Geocities. Before Geocities was taken offline, it's content was archived and is now available for download as a 650 GB torrent. While this seems like a large amount of data, it is estimated that around 2,551,568,697 GB data per day was created in 2011! While the earlier days of the internet were largely image and text based content,  data today is in the form of images, text, social media posts, videos, businesses, services and user generated content. All this only increases our dependency on search engines. More than the challenge of indexing all the data, search engines are starting to grapple with relevancy of results. The added complication is that some of the social media and other sites are not publicly available to be indexed. The two main search engines - Google and Bing seem to be taking markedly different approaches. Fundamentally, the approach...

Frittatas If you are looking for an easy breakfast for a Sunday morning, frittatas fit the bill perfectly. It is healthy, filling and easy to make. Contributed by  Rajan Manickavasagam . Published  20. May 2012 Ingredients 1-2   tablespoons  olive oil 1  chopped garlic 1   teaspoon  pepper 1  chopped onion 1  diced carrot 1  diced potato 1  chopped mushroom 1  chopped tomato 1   teaspoon  of salt (or to taste) 3  eggs 1/2  cup milk Instructions Pre-heat the oven to 175 C for 5 minutes. Mix all the vegetables in a baking dish. Add salt, pepper and olive oil and toss all the vegetables. Bake all the vegetables in the oven for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk the egg and milk together. After the vegetables are cooked, pour in the egg and milk mixture into the vegetables. Bake for a further 15 minutes and the frittata should be ready. Happy eating. Further det...

Posted by Rajan Manickavasagam May 15th, 2012 Designing Great Data Products Rating: 3 out of 5 Image: O'Rielly Many companies and commentators highlight the growing data that is created and consumed everyday. I was naturally curious to understand more about how companies can use all this data to their advantage. I came across this book - 'Designing Great Data Products' in O'Reilly. The title sounded great, but to my disappointment, it is a short book. I anyway went ahead and read the book.The authors of the book are folks from kaggle , a company specialising in statistics and analytics. The book mainly talks about an approach called 'DriveTrain'. This  approach is about using data to drive actions. The 'DriveTrain' approach consists of 4 steps - Define a clear objective - I like this one. Please refer my previous post about problem definition . Levers - Identify the systems, processes etc that can be controlled. Data...

Image Credits:  http://openclipart.org/user-detail/technoargia Often a problem is defined on it's own, something like 'I want to reduce traffic jams in a city'. The advantage of having an open statement like that is that it can be interpreted in different ways and people come up with various ideas and solutions. But, the downside is that a lot of time is spent in coming with the various solutions. Alternatively you could define the problem within a boundary. The same problem could be defined in other ways like - 'I want to reduce traffic jams in a city without building new roads' or 'I want to reduce traffic jams in a city without increasing public transport' etc. This way the problem and the constraints are known and therefore any further ideation, solution is more focussed. All this probably increases the chances of a solution being successful. Another way to define a problem is as a contradiction. An example would be - 'I want to create a ...

I chose the word friction deliberately for the title of the post. More on that later. Let me first explain what I mean by control, content and connections. Photo by  Paulo Barcellos Jr.     Control This is the ability by which people are going to control their access to all things digital and more. By digital, I mean - web, media and communication. Control is today offered by various devices - mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop, TV, music players and so on. The major manufacturers of these devices are technology and consumer appliance companies like Apple and Samsung. More and more, these devices are not tied into any specific kind of content or connection.Within the control space, there are those who provide just the hardware or software or both. Apple has always done both. The Microsoft-Nokia partnership, Google-Motorola acquisition, Samsung points to a trend that companies want to follow that model. Companies that do only one of them are at risk...

We have seen the world of services evolve taking many shapes and forms like SOA, REST and API's. REST seems to be on the way to becoming the de-facto language of the internet. Most often, we create application and business layer in Services and API's. However, the data layer continues to be tightly bolted with the database. There are now some alternatives emerging. There is an open source (MIT License) data access layer called restSQL . restSQL Architecture (source: www.restsql.org) Once set-up, it will provide a REST based access to the database. This means that all the SQL statements like insert, select, update, delete etc can be executed using HTTP GET's  and POST's. Like any other REST service, it provides a platform agnostic method of accessing the database. Since it is hosted as a web application, it can be scaled and managed like any other web application. Lastly, one needs to update the database drivers and configuration only in this layer a...

Chicken Kebabs Recently, I saw a cooking programme on TV showing street food. I thought, I will try own version of a middle eastern classic - chicken kebabs. It's perfect for a dinner with friends. Contributed by Rajan Manickavasagam . Published 06. Feb 2012 Ingredients 4-6   tablespoons  olive oil 1   tablespoon   garlic olive oil 1   tablespoon  chilli infused olive oil 4 chicken legs 1 teaspoon turmeric powder 1 teaspoon red chilli powder 1 teaspoon mixed peppercorns 1 teaspoon cumin powder 1 teaspoon of garam masala powder 1 teaspoon of coriander powder 1 teaspoon of nutmeg powder 1 teaspoon of coarse black pepper 1 teaspoon of dried mixed herbs (basil, thyme, rosemary) 1-2 teaspoon of rock salt (or to taste) 1 chopped onion 2 chopped garlic cloves 1 sliced ginger Instructions In a bowl, add the olive oil, garlic olive oil and chilli infused oil. Roll the chicken legs in the...

Google has recently been in the news for their latest update to search, called 'Search plus your world'. It is about showing google plus results in the search results. After the launch of google plus, it was inevitably going to be linked in with search.  However, on the personal search space, there has been another startup making news. It's called - greplin - www.greplin.com . 'Grep' is from the old unix command. It is a 'freemium' service and the free features are quite enough for most users. You can link all your online accounts and all the information - mails, contacts, documents, tweets, facebook posts, dropbox and so on. Overview: The centre of the page holds a search box along with a filter option. On the left, all your linked accounts and status show up. Above the search box, is the size of your personal index. There is an iphone app also available. With each of us using many online services (facebook, linkedin, twitte...