How to create infographics?

Data is boring to read. Infographics is nice way to represent your data.

Here are some tools/blogs on how to create infographics:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-unbeatable-types-of-infographic-free-tools-to-create-them/27010/

http://www.gunn.co.nz/map/ (world map)

http://creately.com

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/awesome-free-tools-infographics/

http://flowingdata.com/2009/09/03/what-visualization-toolsoftware-should-you-use-getting-started/

Here are few sites that host infographics:
http://www.coolinfographics.com/

Java: Serializable vs. Externalizable

Externalizable is subclass of Serializable. readExternal(ObjectInput), writeExternal(ObjectOutput) are two methods that should be implemented by classes implementing Externalizable interface. Its the responsibility of the class to save/restore contents of the object/super-types etc.

Serializable uses reflexion to marshal/un-marshal object. Classes implementing Serializable interfaces dont have to implement any methods for saving/restoring contents of objects.

One argument is that Externalizable is so java 1.1, java reflexion is improved a lot and we dont need Externalizable these days as performance savings due to Externalizable is minimal. This is NOT correct. Look at https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/wiki/ which compares performance of various java serializers. You can see that java manual serialization (using externalizable) is 50X faster than java built-in serialization.

Links:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.3/docs/api/java/io/Externalizable.html
http://geekexplains.blogspot.com/2008/05/externalizable-in-java-what-is-it-used.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/817853/what-is-the-difference-between-serializable-and-externalizable-in-java

On Lean Startups

Came across this blog (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2011/02/month-is-fifteen-weekends.html) which talks about lean startups (http://boston.theleanstartupmachine.com/). Sounds something similar to hackathon.
Here are some links:
http://www.slideshare.net/sk2185/san-startup-machine-presentation-4779224
http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2010/04/27/top-5-myths-about-the-lean-startup/
http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

Does reading good code improve your coding?

'Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective' - suggests reading good code to improve our coding style. I have no idea whether reading good code improves our coding style or not.

Any way, I'll try reading some good code and update this post with my observation/results.

How to focus

Take baby steps.
Try to focus for one minute; take small break.
Repeat this for 30mins to 1 hour.

Next day, try to focus for two minutes, take small break.

Repeat the same exercises, till you can focus for 30mins.

Read more about this here: http://zenhabits.net/focus/