geek evaluation

Sounds very strange but this has been the case recently. Trina Thompson is suing her alma mater Monroe College in New York city for the $70,000 tuition because the school has failed to secure gainful employment for her. She claims that the college’s Office of career advancement was not helpful with her job search. Thompson is suing for an additional amount of $2,000 for stress caused by her inability to find work.

Not a very good example in this economy in US when 10% of population is with work and graduates who are passing out of college are finding themselves burdened with college loan and not in situation to pay that off.

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

If I write it down today and say “I always told you so” , you would not believe me. But couple of years back while discussing with my friends and colleagues I was telling them that google has the best chance to give challenge to Microsoft in Operating Systems. It is not that google has best brains(I do not doubt that) but because it is following a very planned strategy. The reason for this was as follows :

When you own a computer , except all the computer game junkies and programmers most of us open up a browser ,surf internet, use MS office suites , email , listen songs or download pictures.

Since google had integrated its own application suite in the web, there was very little use of an Operating system. So why can’t a browser like Firefox(Chrome was not out then)not be installed  on Linux and sold to customers.

So on browser you surf internet , upload and share pictures. For work you can use google office suite which works very well within browser . So you do not need a full fledge OS.  A lightweight linux can be used and you save your $100 which you pay for OS.

And this I was saying before Chrome(Google’s browser ) was released.

Today google has announced they are launching Google Chrome Operating System in second half of 2010.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Read it here in google blog

Currently they are targeting net book , but no reason why it cannot be upgraded for laptops in coming years.

There is a lot of business learning from this piece of news and with what Microsoft has been doing for years. We will cover that in next post.

Spring team has released 3.0 version of their popular Spring source framework. This is a third major release  after 2.0 and 2.5 .

What are the new features in Spring 3.0?

1. The Spring Framework is now based on Java 5, and Java 6 is fully supported.

2. The entire framework code has been revised to take advantage of Java 5 features like generics, varargs and other language improvements.  The code is still compatible with older versions of Java

3. Spring Expression Language – Spring has introduced an expression language which is similar to Unified EL in its syntax but offers significantly more features

The following is an example of how the Expression Language can be used to configure some properties of a database setup

<bean class=“mycompany.RewardsTestDatabase”> <property name=“databaseName” value=“#{systemProperties.databaseName}”/> <property name=“keyGenerator” value=“#{strategyBean.databaseKeyGenerator}”/> </bean>

4. Some core features from the JavaConfig project have been added to the Spring Framework now. This means that the following annotations are now directly supported:

5. Additional annotations such as @CookieValue and @RequestHeaders have been added

6. Early support for asynchronous method invocations through the use of the new @Async annotation (or EJB 3.1’s @Asynchronous annotation).

7. The most exciting new feature for the Web Tier is the support for building RESTful web services and web applications

8. Object to XML mapping functionality (OXM) from the Spring Web Services project has been moved to the core Spring Framework now

9. Extended support for meta-annotations: Spring’s @Scope and @Transactional annotations, as well as specialized stereotypes such as @Service and @Controller, can be applied as meta-annotations on custom annotations now. for eg

Source :  Spring 3.0 documentation

You must be reading about stories of some entrepreuners that how they can make couple of thousand dollars a month from google by using google fast cash. Man I was amazed  that google had such a program and I never knew . How stupid of me to stick with adsense which pays you so poorly.

I did a little research and found that this is nothing but a scam (was’nt surprised) . The only thing which google offers is google adsense and nothing like fast cash.

Please do not fall for it and waste your time and money . There is no short cut to success.

May 28 had been a pretty exciting day for tech industry . There were 2 big news .

1. Google unveiled its stealth project Google Wave. Although google wave is not open to public yet but looking at the preview of it is sure to get you excited. So what is google wave ?

Google Wave is a in browser communication and collobration tool. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client.

More about google wave here .

2. Microsoft its search engine Bing . With the bing came a joke “But it is not google”

There was so much hype around the bing but on the day of the laucnh , looked the site had real issues.

But we need some real challenge to google. It is getting smarter day by day and has established a near virtual monopoly.

I am not sure what microsoft is up to. On the one hand it has launched wave and on other hand it is talking to yahoo.

The news should be out pretty soon.

This is a not a very good period for people who are looking for jobs. But there is still some glimmer of hope for people in India. Companies like Tata capital are planning to have 128 exclusive branches in tier-I and tier-II cities by the end of this year.

Aditya Birla Financial Services registered a 36% growth in its revenues in FY09 and is hiring aggresively.

The trend of recruiting during these times is more company-specific than an industry phenomenon.

In US the biggest employer is Federal government which has lot of posts still vacant. Health industry is another sector which had seen some aggressive hiring although it has slowed down this quarter.

This is smart moves by the company who have planned for growth in the long run. During these times , companies get a lot a choices and employees are also willing to compromise on the salaries.

While we were publicizing , geekevaluation , one of the renowned person posed this question

1. There are plenty of LMSs out there with this functionality and more – what makes your special?

2. You say the user takes the test on their own (you email them the link). This is more or less useless unless the test is conducted in a proctored environment (anyone can look up answers online, or ask a friend)

A very genuine questions from customer perspective.

My reply was
we are different in sense that
a) we allow users to customize tests by selecting more than one topic so for eg you want to hire a Sr programmer with skills in Java, Oracle and AJAX. You can create a test by combining these three topics and defining hwo many questions are required in each topic.
b) You can create your own tests and that would cost 75% less.
c) Talking about content , our question bank on technical topics is something which you might not find with others as we had designed questions based on practical experience , not just concept.

These 3 features are a big plus and differentiate us.

Yes it is true that the candidate can search for answers and call a friend. To tackle this

1.For now we disabled copy/paste so that user cannot do googling. In programming questions, it is difficult to call up some one , explain the code and get the answer. The shortest was to do is copy paste , find answer in google or run the code your self.
Disabling copy paste would solve some of these issues.
2.We had thought of proctored environment but that would be sometimes in future.
3.We are also thinking of tracking IP address to at least ensure that the candidate had taken the test from the city in which he resides.

And let us not forget that this is just the elimination , not the selection criteria

Please click here to follow the conversation

When you sign up on the geekevaluation.com, you get 10 test units free. How these units can be used ?

If you have your own tests i.e you are not using geek evaluation question bank, for each candidate that has been scheduled for tests and takes a tests, one test unit is consumed

That means you can test 10 candidates for free!!

If you use our question bank to configure tests, then you for each candidate that has been scheduled for tests and takes a tests, four test units are consumed.

That means you can test 2 candidates for free!!

After you have consumed these test units, each subsequent unit is for $0.99.

If you live outside USA, we can talk about pricing relative to your country.

Please mail us at sales@geekevaluation.com

I am pleased to launch the geekevaluation to the public today. This is our beta launch and we would continue to make improvements, add features and add new topics and questions.

The basic differentiating factor from other sites is that we allow you to customize the exams as per your requirements. Apart from that you can add your own questions, import the files and create your own exams.

And the best part of it, if you have created your own exam, we charge you $1.99 $0.99 for each tests taken by an candidate.

Impossible to find a better deal than that.!

You could find more details of our features here

http://www.geekevaluation.com/features.html

We have done the testing of the application thoroughly but there might be some clinks which might have slipped .

Please do feel free to report us at support@geekevaluation.com. Also feel free to drop in your comments and suggestions.