English Phrases Came Across

I love readily newspaper and online news every day and it happens that I come across many good English phrases. The better way to remember them is to create a blog entry, so that I can share with other people too. Here I would like to share the same and keep updating it.

Explanations are taken from

2008-08-18

breathe down someone’s neck

to pay very close attention to what someone does in a way that annoys or worries them.

1. It’s awful having to work with a boss who’s breathing down your neck the whole time.

2. You love Visual Basic 6.0, but .NET is breathing down your neck.

spill the beans

to disclose/reveal the secret

The employees must not spill the beans about the company after leaving the organization.

pit against

to set in direct opposition or competition

1. a war that pitted brother against brother

2. In the game, the weaker was pitted again the stronger person

WideStudio IDE

Today it happened to be to find out about WideStudio IDE primarily developed in Japan.  It’s an open source GUI based application development environment providing support for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. It has been developed in C++. The following features really attract the cross platform developers.

• Multi platform application development. For example, if the application is developed in Windows, can also run in Linux
• Multi Encoding support for Unicode (UTF8), EUCJP and SJIS. It handles encoding independently of the encoding of the underlying platform.
• Freely available for personal and business use.  No need to publish the source
• Application development is possible for Desktop, large server and even for embedded devices
• Supports C, C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, OCaml
• Multi Widget Toolkit support

There are many good open source IDEs are available for applicatin development presently.  God bless open source.

WebKit – The Web Browser Engine

Today, I have been trying to work with CDT – C/C++ Development Tool plug-in in Eclipse. There was some problem of tool chain being not enabled in Eclipse. After going through so many web pages up-down and left-right, I didn’t find much help for the same, but yes I found this interesting Web Browser Engine called WebKit.

WebKit is an open source project and to my surprise, many browsers and mobile platforms have started using it. There were bigs names like Google Android, Nokia S60, Motorola MOTOMAGX, Apple iPhone and the list was going on. It seems that it has become de facto standard for browsing engine.

WebKit usage

Google Insight

Recently Google has introduced a new tool called Google Insight for Search Beta.

It is primarily aimed for Marketing people who are very much interested in regional and demographic impacts of a product. It helps them to take a proper decision which product can work for which kind of environment and what kind of people.

Eclipse

Eclipse is open development platform. I have been trying to learn it for a long time as it facilitates Android platform application development. I have got hands on it at last. It seems the tool is excellent and provides a lot of feature which I used to dream about.

I started it with Welcome page and tried to explore the different features starting from the view to creating a new Hello World application. Yeah the same one which was created by Brian Kerningham and Dennis Ritchie in C programming. It’s fun to create it a step by step procedures for Java.

Eclipse is really well thought application development environment having the following features.

- Different versions of the same components are easily available

- Project creation step guides

- File movement within the workbench

- Perspective concept thought it’s similar, but really well arranged

- Refactor feature for creating new functions from existing code

- Quick outline view

- Highlighting errors while writing the codes

- Tool finding the required import packages

- Hierarchy view of the project

- Look and feel is decent too and so on..

My personal suggestion is that it’s worth to try it. I will surely write about it in the future.

Seven Medical Myths from Dr. Well

Here are the myths :

1. Drink at least 8 glasses of water a day:
2. We use only 10 percent of our brains:
3. Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
4. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
5. Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser:
6. Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals
7. Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy:

Click to see what Dr. Well says

Stephen Hawking – The biography

I have just completed Stephen Hawking – A biography by Kristine Larsen. The book is really awesome. The life long journey is described very well taking one through personal and professional aspects of a cosmological scientist who made breakthrough in black hole theories.

I heard a lot about him in newspaper, magazine and TV, but it was never detail enough for me to understand. Thus, I grabbed the book and learned his life struggle. He has given a good challenge to the life in all the circumstances starting from the childhood to till date. His work is more concentrated about the black hole theories and redefining the known universe earlier. He is very straight when it comes to challenge the invalid theories. He took many bets and won as well. He has received so many awards and honors from around the World. He has the burning desire to do something. Thouch he was physically challenged by ALS, but he showed tremendous work of the mind. If one desire, who can stop him. He learned to do all the theory calculation in his mind.

He openly accepted himself as not believing in God. He feels that everything can be understood through sciense. He refined the space-time theory bringing in the imagenary time. He also wrote many papers and books like “A Brief History of time”, “Universe in a nutshell” etc.

After reading the scientific discovery of him and the way the universe is balanced and going to be; how can one deny the existence of God?

Close the ‘Distance’

The human life is interwoven through the relationship. If we remove the relationship from the human life, it is as like a dried bush. The relationship waters the bush and makes it active.

Anywhere we go, we are involved with people. We interact with new group of people and it becomes our identity. We have family, team, office, college, school, gym and so on kind of group of people. We have different roles and responsibilities in each of them. Each role has its own importance and the same way it demands its own tolls.

The human is so selfish that it would like to see the what benefits can be achieved before starting any relationship. Many a time a people have shallow relationships with some people, and the close with some special people. To achieve the close relationship, the person sometimes compromise, lose ego and try to make the other people happy in any way. In other form, people would like to close the ‘Distance’ in other sense.

The better the distance is closed, the better the relationship is and better the life is. It is required to put the efforts by each end. Sometimes one has to initiate though other party is not interested. It takes sometimes, but it works and the life is better.

UML Introduction (1)

UML – Unified Modeling Language

Why UML?

There were many modeling and methodologies available out there before 1994 to design the software systems. There was need to have a common understanding about the visual representation of the software system. The pioneering works is done in Rational through Booch, Rumbaugh and Jacobson who combined their visual modeling languages and methodologies to present the world with UML.

What are the building blocks of UML?

1 + 1 = 3, 4 or 10

Recently I have been listening to Audio book of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People of Stephen Covey. In the habit 7, he talks about the synergy after achieving all other habits.

Two people doing the work individually or later combining their work cannot produce the better than when they do it co-operatively together. 1+1 can be half or two. The half result is produced when their combined energy is negative. 1+1=2 means just transaction when somebody buys from a shopkeeper.

When the people’s energy is combined together positively, it can produce unlimited results. The end product is the result of individual’s opinion, understanding and common goal to achieve something. Thus, it can last longer rather than just a fix for the the instance.

Each individual thinks and perceives the World differently according to their personal experiences. Thus, while working together, such a diversity has to be well respected to gather as much information. The diversity approach can help the project to be executed considering all the aspects and the synergy generated is tremendous. The end result is more than what it is used to be in traditional approach.