2008 - Year of the mashups

I was spellbound by Yahoo Pipes today. I have been wanting to organise my del.icio.us feeds for a long time, especially to filter out posts which are not in English. It was through one of the del.ici.ous post I happen to read this wonderful blog a-three-dimensional-approach-to-organizing-your-feeds-using-google-reader and learn about the Yahoo Pipe.

As a first time visitor to Yahoo Pipes what struck me is its user interface. The user interface is very lucid and elegant for the complex functionality it provides. Who would have thought such an interface would be possible over the internet couple of years ago? There is a huge collection of shared pipes which one can consume, and Good God some of them are mind boggling!

What impressed me was the pipe editor and its debugger which allows the user to view and refine the contents at every stage.

Yahoo Pipe is a mashup. A mashup is a web based application which combines data from one or more site / service and creates a new service which is not provided by the source.

More I think of mashups, more I am reminded of unix's little languages and its ability to combine small applications to achieve a larger task. I believe that we will uncover many more of these unix paradigms in the near future.

Year 2008 certainly would be the Year of the Mashups

Shu-Ha-Ri

Shu-Ha-Ri is a Japanese martial concept which describes the path of a student from a novice to an expert. The journey of the student is composed of three stages

Shu - The first stage describes the student learning under the guidance of his Guru (teacher) and strictly follows his teachings.

Ha - Is the second stage where the student reaches a level where he can take few liberties and innovate without breaching the tradition.

Ri - Is the ultimate stage where the student reaches a state where all his techniques are natural.

One should remember that the levels are not linear, they are represented as concentric circles with Shu within Ha and Shu and Ha within Ri

Interestingly, I was talking to my father about the philosophy and asked him if vedantha does have anything in parallel. My father then explained to me about Shravanam, Mananam and Nidhidyasanam, where

Shravanam - Is the phase when a student ardently listens to his Guru & Scriptures
Mananam - Is the phase where the student puts theory to practice, and tests his learnings
Nidhidyasanam- Is when the student contemplates on his theory and practice achieved through the first two phases.