Programmers of the world, go learn Java!

Java is for sissies, real programmers do C! Or for that matter, they prefer assembly! Perl is cool, Python is way more cooler! All the jobs today require MySQL and PHP...

These are all common wisdom, ain't them? Well my programmer friends, I've got news for you. NO, they're not!

This is a list of top 15 (ok, 14!) jobs that I compiled from job postings in a popular job posting website (http://www.dice.com/). I simply entered the name of some popular programming languages and wrote down the number of results returned. A total number of 86899 jobs were returned, which I sorted them and did the graph below.



Now this is interesting, isn't it? Who knew that Java has conquered commercial frontiers? PHP any one? NO, go learn simple scripting! Oh my God, people are still looking for COBOL programmers. More than PHP and Python. WOW!

So what should we learn here? That if you want to get into a programming job, if you know Java, C, .NET platforms and some simple scripting, then you're qualified for 60% of the companies. (and no, don't waste your time on PHP, Perl or Python).

Note that I'm not talking about how cool or powerful or even useful a language is. I'm talking about GETTING PAID doing programming.

Now where is my old Java textbook...?!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

There is a new kid in town.

Yes, There is a new kid in town, and it name is... Palm Treo 680.

Call me old fashioned if you want, but I'm still using a palm Zire 21, basically because it can go on weeks without recharging. But, recently I'm having a problem with my bulging pockets; You see, taking a palm, a Nokia 3650 (remember the old beast?) and an mp3 player has taken its toll on my pockets (Well, what do you expect, I'm a starving student, not a CEO! Well not yet!)

So, naturally when I hear a CHEAP palm treo, without an antenna is going to arrive soon, I'll jump in joy. BUT, if only it is cheap.
And by cheap I mean less than $200 cheap, without a plan. I have my GSM sim card from T-mobile, which I'm happy with, and I don't want to buy a (new) plan to change my phone.

All this said, this is a list of what I hope to be in this new phone:
1. low price.
2. long battery life, even if I listen to mp3 on it.
3. good mp3 playback quality.

The rest is already there. My favourite? GCC is already ported to palm (Geeks know what I mean!), and it supports Java. What else does a man want?! (Um... did I mention it needs to be cheap?!)

Oh by the way, I don't care about the VGA camera. It's all about the lens. the pictures coming out of 1.3 Mega pixel cameras are as bad as VGA ones. Well, for that matter, I also ditched my canon A520 for picture quality in favour of a Pentax DSLR. Any way, my advice is: Don't shoot pictures with cell phone cameras! You're just ruining the picture! Get a real digital camera (only my 2 cents).

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

Am I a geek, or a nerd?!

In my last post I called myself a geek. Since then, I have come across a nerd test. Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm extremely proud to announce myself as:


3% scored higher (more nerdy), and
97% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!


Now, a question arises here, Am I a geek or a nerd (of supreme nerd god type)?! Well, after checking wikipedia, I believe I'm a nerd! Other sources may differ in defining nerds and geeks, but I'd rather stick to what wikipedia says (partly because I have an official nerd score now!).

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!

Which country likes Chris de Burgh the most ?!

As far as I can remember, I have always been a fan of Chris. He was the first artist in my childhood which I started to pay attention to his lyrics as well as the music, and I was totally mesmerized by his songs!

I just recently got a CD of him, and after listening to it for a while (oh man, isn't "Moonlight and Vodka" a touching one?) I thought I could take a look at his website. To make a long story short, I ended up in the fan section of his site, which is categorized by countries.

Now, you may already know what a geek I am! I felt curious to know which country has the largest number of fans, and with help of some quick and dirty perl scripts, I managed to gather the required info (I'm rather new at Perl, so it took me about an hour to write these scripts. But I'm improving!). Finally I fed the data to Microsoft Excel, and here are the results:



Now, the results turned out to be very interesting. Guess which country in the world has the most number of fans of Chris de Burgh? Ireland you say?! Not even close (Ireland is at rank 16, after Turkey, if only you count Ireland and Northern ireland together)! The first country in the list is Iran my friends!

A total of 5316 people are among his registered fans as of today (October 2nd, 2006), among which the top 10 countries are:



Now, these numbers don't count the Iranian fans who are in USA or Canada, but only people inside Iran. If you browse through his fans in USA or Canada however, you'll see many Iranian names, which I didn't consider for this study.

I wonder why it's like this; can anybody please provide me with some possible reasons?!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!