Google grabs a whole lot more...

It seems like Google, the becoming arch rival to Microsoft, is doing a full blown recruitment. No wonder the big names are behind after it made its IPO. Here is a list of ppl that i came across while screening the net who recently moved to Google.com. I have tried to give a short brief about the individuals. Following Josh Bloch moving from here are the others... The list is quite impressive indeed...

1. Adam Bosworth BEA's Chief Architect
2. Neal Gafter, who was in charge of javac @ Sun
3. David Stoutamire ,worked on Java performance at Sun Microsystems 
4. Greg Stein is an engineering manager at Google, working with their blogging software team. Prior to that, Greg was a director of engineering at CollabNet where he managed the Subversion project and releases of their SourceCast product. He also worked at Microsoft as a development manager. He is also the current Chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, a technical advisor forActiveState, and a board advisor for Secure Software
5. Rob Pike . Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs
6. Kevin Fox is currently a user interface designer at Google Inc. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Kevin worked in Yahoo! Inc.'s User Experience Design group, leading the interaction design for Yahoo! Messenger, Chat, and other properties. In 2002, Kevin left Yahoo! for Carnegie Mellon University where he earned his Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction
7. Jason Shellen. our very own man behind the scenes of these bloger, the new owners of Blogger, Blog*Spot and bStats! It's all about the [b].

Not to mention google runs on a the largest linux cluster in the world, and Microsoft has to try and use their own pitiful OS

Sun lost an expert...

I was shocked to know that Josh Bloch, the author of record breaking book "Effective Java", A java genius,  is no more with SUN. TSS  has the news..
 Yes... He seems to have accepted a position at Google. This may be good news for other programming communities as well as the whole developer community as he gets freedom for his inclination in general but defintely a loss for java the community. Hope he continues to love the language he worked in the past and help it see more success.

Font Wars coming to an end ?! (tamil)

It's been so long since tamil language was brought into the computer arena. But the main obstacles were to display tamil font over the internet. Many thanks to Unicode. Now tamil can be used in google search too. I was very impressed with some of the findings on the net on making tamil move more towards Unicode. Especially I was amazed with the work that has gone in making tamil blogs ! My very first entry into a Unicode based tamil page was www.ezilnila.com SIMPLY WONDERFUL!! Following some of the links took me to tamil blogs!!
Wow. It's all Unicode. There are a couple of tools that are useful when it comes to Unicode tamil stuff. The one that I use and my all time favorite free sw is e-Kalappai by default it does not come with Unicode support but there is a plug-in to be installed to enable Unicode. All this is require if you wanna put your work on Unicode. But just to read those pages off the net you need NOTHING. All you need is a quite latest browser.
But if you want to Google with tamil just turn the e-Kalappai Unicode version on and type in the google search bar any tamil word by typing the pronunciation of the word. For example "thisaihal" . The characters might look funny on your screen sometimes but they make good sense to google engine. Hit Go and see the results.. You will be amazed indeed.

Here are some of the blogs and e-zines that keeps you within tamil worlds.

KAsi's blogs(got pointers to other too)
maraththadi,
valaipoo
thisaihal
e-sangam
There are a bunch of yahoo groups too.
maraththadi news group
Another site that needs special mention is tamil linux
tamil linux news group

An audio visual tutorial on unicode in tamil
I am gonna try my first tamil uni code font entry here.. see if you guys can read it without a problem...

வணக்கம் அன்பர்களே
இது உங்கள் வாகீசன் !!