Have you used Google’s new Search By Image?

I tired this. Don’t expect much though. It seems to be decent for searching places, art pictures (which means it can search abstract patterns, symbols etc.) and creatures. For everything this else it simply seems to match images’ histograms. Anyway this is not bad and quite useful. The google UI too is cool and supports drag and drop.

Head over to http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html for a intro.

Why The New Guy Can’t Code

Why The New Guy Can’t Code.

Read the link above to know how IT companies’ technical interview should be. Not asking some quiz. It is really frustrating when you are asked such questions in interview which you know is never going to be needed in the job.  When you get reject because of those questions, and the interviewer chooses to ignore your real-world skills then it becomes darn frustrating.

I remember getting screened out of Amdocs’ first round of written exams because of some maths question!  How the hell maths question decided how my CS knowledge is? They might reason that there are too many candidates and interviewing all is not possible; well if that is so then why not use lucky draw? Because such arbitrary questions and lucky draw will give same result, and lucky draw is easier to conduct. Well yes, lucky draw will draw much more criticism, so we are bound to see such arbit questions anyway.

So, all the best job seekers.

Windows Phone 7 is, as we speak, losing fantastic applications because of its approval process.

Designer Silverlight » Blog Archive » Windows Phone 7 UX – One Size Does Not Fit All.

I would like to quote one para from the linked post.

I can’t overestimate how frustrated my clients are with the Microsoft approval process. It ranges from sadness to fury. Clients who are on virtually all other platforms are expressing frustration that they have never had so much trouble getting through an approval process. The rejection reports are inconsistent, spotty, and fragmented. We will submit an app 5 times and get different “errors” back each time. Nine times out of ten, those errors are not errors, but complaints about UX functionality. Of those, at least half of them are complaints about functionality that, if fixed, would worsen the user experience.

I love Microsoft and I love Windows Phone 7, but rejecting apps based on the UX guidelines (while not giving us the tools to abide by the guidelines effectively) is a recipe for suicide.