1. Dennis Ritchie – one of the creators of the Unix operating system and author of C programming language
2. Ken Olsen – Co-founder of Digital Equipment Corp, the company that built PDP-7 (first computer to run Unix)
3. Paul Baran – an important Internet pioneer who developed packet switching
4. Jacob Goldman – in 1969 came up with the idea of setting up an independent research lab for copier-maker Xerox Corp, which lead to inventing the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming
5. John McCarthy – Creator of Lisp and the person who coined the term “artificial intelligence”
6. John R. Opel – IBM Chairman John Opel ushered IBM’s PC into the market, taking over as CEO of the company in 1981
7. Ashawna Hailey – AMD’s first Intel-compatible chip, the 9080, was built in 1974, by a team led by Ashawna Hailey
8. Jean Bartik – ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the world’s first electronic computer’s programming was done by a crackerjack team of six women lead by Jean.
9. Nobutoshi Kihara – Sony’s chief inventor. His groundbreaking work on magnetic tape recorders, videotape, and digital photography
10. Robert Galvin – ran Motorola for nearly 30 years, ushering in the world’s first portable telephone and turning the small two-way radio manufacturing company he inherited from his father into the world’s leader in cellular phones
11. Charles Walton – patented the technology used in RFID chips in the 1970s

Original Article: 11 Who Died in 2011 (And Were Not Named Steve)

A message from Captain Planet (aka Saurabh Arora) showing the effect of global warming and how we can take small steps everyday to avoid further worsening the situation.

There is something very powerful about online education (eLearning). Assuming that one can create really good courses, it enables any individual to start competing with the large Universities. (Many Universities have seen the benefit of online education and they have certainly started offering their courses online.) Students can be located anywhere around the world and they can learn things at their own pace. With social media one can even achieve a very high collaboration between the students (peers) and teachers. This can scale very well and since the class capacity is infinite, we can completely remove the barrier to entry. Finally education can be made very affordable, since the cost of running an online course is extremely low compared to the bureaucratic Universities. Thus it helps in “Bringing quality education to everyone“.

One of the real problems we run into with this approach is, how do you “certify” the student? Coz these individual educators won’t have the credibility like a University nor will they be able to give an acceptable degree/certificate as a “proof of learning”. The question is can social media/web fill the void?

The Social Media/Web is still at a very nascent stage, evolving rapidly. Today people don’t really use it to validate someone’s credibility online. As of today “Certificates” have more value.

Globally, using social web to certify people has not taken off. LinkedIn is trying. I’m (or should I say, I was) trying something similar with the Agile Alliance LinkedIn Group. Lot of other people like http://www.wevouchfor.org and http://www.workingwithrails.com/ have tried.

To think about it, Open Source (being a committer/contributor on an open source project) helps you build social credibility. This model has certainly worked for a lot of developers.

Things like http://www.topcoder.com/ and http://www.codechef.com/ are taking off very well. But they are different, not so much social media.

Imagine “real” people on the web can vouch for your experience, knowledge and skill. You can demonstrate the same with applications/tools you’ve built. Your social status speaks for you and you can completely do away with the traditional certification model. I certainly see us moving in that direction. Decentralize and distribute the ability to certify people.

I was just looking through the Google Analytics on my blog, I was surprised to see Firefox dominate the browser usage race. Also surprised to see how fast Google Chrome has penetrated the market. (Over the years, Firefox has got really fat and slow. Chrome’s launch timing was perfect. Just when many geeks could not take FF’s speed and instability anymore.)

Yesterday, my blog had 3,697 visits from 16 different browsers.

And if you see the break up by Operating Systems

This data matches that from w3schools’ Browser Stats, except that my blog is not very IE friendly hence less IE traffic. Also I hope Windows usage goes down…

Beyond dogma, beyond ceremony, beyond logical & rational bull-shit, detaching self from cutting edge agile practices to embrace, scale & sustain essential agility.

From Fail Safe experimentation to lots of Safe Fail experimentation.

From Objectivity to Subjectivity to Relativity to Uncertainty.

From Structure to Chaos.

From Illusions to Idealism to Realism.

Beginner’s Mind, here I come….

”Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator and feel better” is something we often hear or read in the Sunday papers. Few people actually follow that advice. Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do? See the results here:

As you might already know, from 1st Oct 09, I’ve joined Industrial Logic full time. I’ll be based out of Mumbai.

Over the last two years, I’ve done various training and consulting gigs (part-time) for IL. Now we feel we can take this relationship to the next level.

My primary responsibilities at IL would be:

• Setting up a small office in Mumbai (1-2 Biz Dev/wizardsMarketing Wizards + 2-4 Developers + 1 UX Designer)
• Contribute content on diverse topics to Greatest Hits, IL’s elarning product
• Help build the elearning platform (in near future, hire some kick ass developers to join this initiative)
• Continue handling in-person training and consulting in Asia (in near future, build a small team to help out)
• Help position IL and Greatest Hits in Asia (marketing elearning to working out an INR pricing, etc)
• Continue building a thriving community of craftspersons in India (and globally)
• Globally, continue pushing the envelope on true agility and bringing unconventional ideas to software development.
• Above all, have fun and learn from THE experts

Would it not be great to get paid to learn new stuff? Unfortunately, we all get lots of offers where we know (at least have this feeling) that either I can earn a lot or I can learn a lot. Somehow its very difficult (not impossible) to have both (earn and learn).

Some people think, traffic lights is THE ONLY way to control and regulate (manage) traffic flow.

For others, esp. those who have seen round-abouts or circles in European countries, know that in some cases round-abouts are a much superior alternative to traffic lights.

And some people who drive on Indian roads know that the first 2 methods don’t really work and they have a chaotic, completely unpredictable, yet self-regulating traffic system.

All 3 are valid ways to manage traffic under the given circumstances. Possibly there are other traffic control systems that I’m not aware of.