June 2007

Situations Ripe for Mistakes

June 30, 2007

We all make mistakes from time to time — some of us more than we would like. Usually, when we look back at some of our past mistakes, we wonder how we could have made them in the first place. Our decisions that led to the mistakes were not logical and could have done with better […]

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Evergreen Creations

June 23, 2007

About 13 years ago, a few movie enthusiasts including me gathered after class hours outside the Great Hall in CMS College, set up a TV and VCR and started playing great movie hits. Among them was Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights”. I remember being extremely touched by the final scene between Chaplin and the flower girl. […]

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The Martyr Complex

June 23, 2007

One of the most destructive behaviors in any relationship is the existence of someone with a martyr complex. As the definition from Wikipedia explains, a “person who has a ‘martyr complex’ desires the feeling of being a martyr for its own sake, seeking out suffering or persecution because it feeds a psychological need.” The characteristics of […]

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Writing an Essay

June 23, 2007

Many of us have had experiences with writing essays during our English language classes and exams, and later during admission or qualification tests like the GMAT. In those situations, the topic is usually provided for us and then we have to write the essay within a certain period of time. Typically, one prepares a formula for managing […]

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Mashup Tools

June 19, 2007

I recently applied for and received (separate) invitations from Microsoft and Google to try out Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor. Both of these products are intended for developers who want to create feed-based mashups. And both are competing products to Yahoo! Pipes — note my original and follow-up reviews. As I mentioned in my […]

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Inviting Competition

June 17, 2007

There was an interesting article in the news recently about Google taking legal action against Vista search. A few months ago, I predicted that Vista search may pose some problems for desktop search products, but I didn’t think it would come to this. There is more to the matter than just the search feature, because […]

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Evaluating Success Criteria

June 16, 2007

Recently I saw a video interview with usability consultant, Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me Think!” During the discussion, he was asked how Google’s simple user interface contributed to its success. He said that the success was not because of the user interface, but because of the fact that Google returned relevant results. The […]

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Effort versus Reward

June 16, 2007

Consider any task that requires effort over a period of time. Examples would be studying a subject or marketing a product. Each such task demands various activities to be performed. For example, when studying a programming language, you will have to read different books and other material, understand various programming environments, and experiment with different […]

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Personal Productivity by Marc Andreessen

June 14, 2007

Recently, I came across Marc Andreessen’s blog. If you remember, he was the co-founder of Netscape Corporation which, for some time during the late 1990s, gave Microsoft a scare with its dominance of the browser market. He has been writing some really good articles, which, like Paul Graham’s, are a joy to read. One of the […]

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Trainable People

June 10, 2007

A manager’s job can be very stressful. The toughest part, in my opinion, is the fact that it doesn’t really matter what the manager does personally. The only thing that really matters is the performance of the people working under the manager. If they do their work correctly, the manager succeeds. If they don’t, the […]

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