Follow your dreams

Been wanting to read Paulo Coelho's book 'The Alchemist' for a long time, so when I saw it lying around on my roommate's desk for a couple of weeks, I finally decided to give it a shot. Once I picked it up, I couldn't keep it down, literally. Started reading it at 12:30 am and finished a little before 4 am. Wonderful read... don't miss it.

Yahoo! preps up to do a Gig

Yahoo! is getting all aggressive to take on the Google guys. Triggered response mechanism? Well, looks it! Let's see what we have... Google becomes search leader ; Yahoo! wakes up, shakes up it's search Google acquires Picasa ; Yahoo! acquires Flickr! Google launches Gmail with 1 Gig; Yahoo! ups their storage to 250 Megs, and now readying to do the Gig Google acquires Pyra Labs' Blogger ; Yahoo! braces up Yahoo! 360° The one thing I love about Yahoo! which Google *still* doesn't have? My Yahoo!

Collaborative app development

Microsoft's Software GreenHouse for mobile development and Google Code are 2 awesome collaborative application development/developer communities which seem really interesting. Hop across and you'll know why!

Carpe Diem like there's no tomorrow!

The last 2 days have been some of the most busiest and most rewarding days for me!

• Organising my first event - the launch of VTU-Microsoft Technology Center
• Attending the Macromedia MAX 2005 Conference

The event was a smooth one, so all of the planning and anxiety finally, well, translated into some productive output!

The Macromedia MAX 2005 Conference was also an amazing experience, being a Dreamweaver and Flash user for years and finally getting to attend one of its events itself was rewarding. But in quality terms, I truly gained a lot of extremely useful knowledge here! This was perhaps my first conference also (exluding one I attended on JAVA some 10 years back which flew over the cuckoo's nest. And my head. Yeah, maybe I'm just dumb!).

What did I learn here? The exciting opportunities Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers, which were sitting right under my nose. Using Templates, working with databases, using pure CSS and eliminating tables altogether - wow! And I thought I knew Dreamweaver! Macromedia has recently also launched Flex, another cool software which is an excellent tool for building simple solutions to complex websites, or more so - Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Flickr is one of the most fantastic examples of RIAs I can think of. Lets not even consider second best.

The sessions I loved best were the one on Flex and the one on CSS & Dreamweaver templates by Greg Rewis of Macromedia.

The fun part of the conference - I got to catch up with buddies Mandar and Martin from Hungama. And Chak of Macromedia using Microsoft Powerpoint to present Macromedia Breeze (the web presentation tool from the Macromedia stable) - some folks from the audience pointed this out! I kept quite, but at the end of his session, I went up to him to commend him for appreciating the fact that Powerpoint is indeed the defacto presentation tool, while Breeze has its own space as an 'online, collaborative whiteboard + presentation environment'. And hey, I love Dreamweaver & Flash! :) Software choices are all about productivity at the end of the day - as my colleague Gaurav Khanna points out.