The 20 greatest equations

Physics Web is carrying out an interesting article in which the equations are rated by a group of people. Few of my favo(u)rites ohm's and kirchoff's are missing. Only consolation is maxwell's are rated at the top.

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/10/2/1/pwpov2_10-04

Euler's are rated second. Obvious. Isn't it!

One of the quotes found in the slashdot discussion related to these ratings.

As they say, in maths things are usually named after Euler, or the first person to discover them after Euler.

Software Architecture using UML

Though UML has been very popular in modelling software, I wonder how much of UML is being used in software architecture. I am an architect my self and normally my architecture artifacts are in one or the other office suite document formats (.doc, .vsd, .ppt) with no formal notations. I always found UML is a natural fit at the low level of modelling rather than at a level of architecture (use cases diagrams are an exception). I have never felt comfortable when using UML at the architecture level and it seemed very artificial.

Recently I have been reading about an article on UML 2 by scott ambler. I completely agree with his views on there is nothing much in UML 2 that is significant. However, the good news is that UML 2 has brought in some good focus on architecture level modelling. The activity diagrams are overhauled to make them more applicable to business activity modelling. The component diagrams are overhauled as well to make them more simpler to use. Package diagrams are formally added for providing a bird's eye view of the classes and packages. However, I feel UML still lacks a sound business process modelling notation (something like BPMN) and a formal data modelling profile.

I am planning to publish detailed paper on this subject. Watch out..

Gmail Invites

Gmail - the email service offered by Google is being said as the most happening thing in the consumer internet after IMs. I mostly agree with this. Revolutionary 1gig free space, I would say is the key behind Gmail's popularity. Added to this invite only sign-up is another fator that has spiced up the Gmail. I think because of these two factors, people are real crazy about having gmail accounts. Surprising is that gmail invites are being sold in eBay. More suprising is that PCQuest (India's top IT magazine) is offering them as prizes to many of their contests. To understand little more about the kind of attention gmail is getting, just look at some of the interesting plug-ins available for gmail.

• GmailGoesThePop - Pop3 proxy interface to Gmail
• GmailNotifier - Gmail Email notifier plug-in for firefox
• GMailDrive - Creates Virtual drive mapping to your gmail account over interent. You can drag and drop files onto your gmail accounts

After all these years of existence I would say Hotmail and Yahoo Mail hasn't got so much attention. Here are few things I liked about Gmail excluding the points mentioned above:

• Import of Contacts from outlook
• AutoCompletion of contacts
• Filters
• Email forwarding
• Email search

Few things I didn't like in Gmail are

• Lack of folders ( I know one can use labels, but they are not same as folders)
• No delete button

Finally before concluding I would like to give away, about 10 Gmail invites (BTW, I have mutltiple gmail accounts). If you are interested let me know by posting a comment with your email id. (Don't worry! I'll not use your email id for any other purpose).