I am pleased to inform you about the IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology 2007 that will be held on 26th and 27th October 2007 at Pune, India.

The conference is an independent event with indepth vendor-neutral technical sessions about Web Services, Ajax, SOA, EJB, Mashups, Frameworks, JSF, Data Caching, Dependency Injection, Patterns and various other aspects of Java software development.

The event is a gathering of the best Java brains in the business and a place to learn from technology thought leaders about the latest and greatest in Java technology. It is also a great place to network and meet like-minded people from across companies and industry segments.

Registrations for the IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology 2007 are open. Register now to grab the very early bird discount that closes on the 31st of Aug 07.

The conference website is http://conference.indicthreads.com. Do check it out.

Being the editor of IndicThreads and a speaker at the event, I certainly will be around at the conference. Look forward to seeing you there.

What’s the difference between the prime minister’s speech on 15th Aug 1947 and 15th Aug 2007? What’s the difference between the president’s and chief minister’s TV addresses in the 80s and those in 2007? The content and the speakers sure have changed, but there have been no changes in the medium of delivery. While technology and presentation mediums have improved dramatically, government and political addresses are still consistently delivered in a dry boring format. In their current form, these speeches would be watched only if the nation is going through some crisis and people are looking for direction from the leader, a la Mussharaf in a troubled Pakistan. However at other times, I wonder how many countrymen would watch for more than a few minutes….

(Cont…Click the scanned article image on the left). Published as part of my column for the Maharashtra Herald that’s published on alternate Saturdays )

For reasons only known to the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), the PMC has now changed the official website from http://www.egovpmc.com to http://www.punecorporation.org and killed egovpmc.com.

PuneCorporation.org is definitely a better name than egovpmc, but why kill the established egovpmc.com? They could have just redirected to the new site. PMC also hasn’t shown the sense to buy the domain name PuneCorporation.com. So please note that http://www.punecorporation.org is the official site while PuneCorporation.com is a fake.

However if you are hoping to get some work done on the corporation site, it doesn’t matter if egovpmc.com or punecorporation.org is the official site, because both sites are currently not working.

I think it’s time to use the Right To Information and check which politician’s family member is minting money by bagging these contracts for the PMC websites and delivering rubbish in return.

Security today is big business in Indian cities. It’s perhaps the profession that has undergone the most change over the past decade. Not just shopping malls and multiplexes but even small shops, restaurants and housing societies today have an abundance of security staff. A housing society might not have proper water supply but it will have a team of uniform clad and baton brandishing security staff. Makes one wonder if it’s a need of the times or if we are just getting increasingly paranoid.

Security guards in most cases seem to serve more to boost egos than to serve any real security function. Private security men have become a modern day city nuisance. Not only do they often abuse whatever authority they enjoy but they also regularly go beyond the limits of their allocated domain. Has anybody ever seen a security personnel busy performing security related work? Parking management or just opening doors ends up being their primary activity. They naturally get bored and therefore seem to entertain themselves by making people like me perform crazy car maneuvers before they let me secure a parking space…

(Cont…Click the scanned article image on the left). Published as part of my column for the Maharashtra Herald that’s published on alternate Saturdays. )

Questions deal with basic Java as well as enterprise Java. You get 30 min to solve a Java question online. The winner this week gets a copy of the book “Beginning EJB 3 Application Development”. Monthly and series winners get music players and an iPod. >> Click here to enter the contest

Every year lakhs of pilgrims walk for over 3 weeks to Pandharpur, driven solely by devotion and faith. A mass of humanity at one place at one time, however also offers a unique opportunity for the government as well as non-government organizations to get across social messages to the people at the grass roots, the ones who matter most for any long lasting social impact.

I was fortunate to be part of one such undertaking this year. Hariyali is an NGO that has been working actively in the field of eco-conservation for over a decade. Most of its work has been in the Thane area. However for the past 3 years it has been conducting a novel campaign of seed distribution amongst warkaris on the pilgrimage to Pandharpur.

The modus operandi of the campaign is quite simple. Mobilize school children in the city to collect seeds of various trees and to pack them into small brown paper packets, each packet carrying about a 100 seeds. Next, utilize the services of volunteers and school children in towns on the pilgrimage route, to spread awareness amongst the warkaris and to distribute the seed packets….

(Cont…Click the scanned article image on the left). Published as part of my column for the Maharashtra Herald that’s published on alternate Saturdays.

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