The last couple of weeks have been hectic.

• MY 1.5yr old HP DVD-Writer is no longer burning CDs/DVDs properly. Nero keeps giving the error message Burn Process Failed at nx. The exact message error is Cannot Perform End-of-Disk-at-once. After wasting almost 15 HP DVDs trying to figure out the damn problem, I called HP service center to resolve the issue as its no longer under warranty. When they took the writer to their office for testing, they reported no such burning issue on their side after writing 6 CDs and 2 DVDs. I am truly running out of luck with this one, unable to find the fault on my PC - reinstalled Nero, updated the firmware etc. Even tried disabling the IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service. Man I wish I knew a hardware geek around. I'm going to keep the writer incase I do come across someone who can really look into it later. I've decided to get Sony's external sleek USB 2.0 driven model DRX-S50U dvd-burner. Sony has always been steady on external media storage.
  
• As a result of not being able to burn DVDs plus my current hard-disk being almost full without having it defragmented for last 3yrs, I'm forced to get an additional internal-drive. So I've decided to push in a 250GB 3.0-Gb/s NCQ hard drive.


• My ISP, Sify, is not pinging through these days. Even though this sprung up just after the rains started 'drizzling' here, its only a coincidence and really has nothing to do with the rains. Rumor has it that there's immense competition between the local cable operators here on connectivity distribution to customers and the result has been vandalism by the new/other party on the existing LAN. Could've written an entire chapter on this - but the last thing I want is some orkut-haters (you know who) banging my head due some political remarks or whatever.
  
• Off lately I've been getting myself into Adobe's Flex SDK to create SWF files via their MXML structure. I never got into Flash before as I always felt (the s/w) naked on anything that was almost a 100% authoring solution. ActionScript 2.0 did exist, but with the new Java-like ActionScript 3.0 language and the non-binary format replacement for fla files, there soon would be a lot of developers jumping into Flex 2. But since its Java based and with the new Flash VM, memory has all of a sudden been a heavy requirement. Even though the resulting SWF is supposed to consume far less client-side memory when compared to a SWF created from Flash 8, it demands heavily during development and testing. Adding a 1GB memory-module to support all this and other services hopefully is a problem solver. Moreover I should then be able to enable many of FireFox's extensions.

That's a lot of work for the next couple of months to make up for !

Lets see whats hot & in-demand by this year end. Im talking mostly about IT jobs and experienced and 2 of these sites (Naukri and MonsterIndia) are specific to India. These were the criteria I set for each site's search :

Naukri	: Min 3yrs Exp
Hotjobs	: 2-5, 5-10 yrs Exp
Dice	: Nil
MonsterIndia	: Min 3yrs Exp
RentACoder	: All not-yet-expired projects

While the first 4 are job board sites, the 5th one, RentACoder is a site dedicated to outsourcing work. I wanted to pick one that isn't a job board but has similar requirements. These do not reflect accurate values and definitely will have errors since the search were based on keyword-search and there was no way to know if the job posting actually had a requirement in that specific domain. Hopefully, each site's search engine has given much-relevant results. I've grouped these graphs based on various field, since theres point comparing ASP with Maya. Some of the graphs displayed below compares the percentage each value contributes to a total across categories. Programming for the Desktop : C is defintely has more results when compared to others. [The next graph shows the result without the graph] and Java is high in number.

Programming for the Desktop : This one is the same as above "Programming for the Desktop" but without the C keyword since 'C' is misleading in many of the search results. Its clear that Java totally takes the lead. Its interesting to note that there are quite a number of outsourced projects required in Delphi while the job posting is very less when compared to other requirements for the same job site. Just to make it clear, the value for Delphi is 45 at Naukri, 73 at HotJobs, 160 at Dice, 68 at MonsterIndia and 35 at RentACoder.

Web / Internet Technologies : This one should be the most interesting one at this time of the century.

PHP may be in-demand, if you club ASP, ASP. NET and C#, you'll notice that Microsoft languages are defintely more-in-demand. Two of the new languages, Python and RoR (Ruby On Rails) probably will pick up in another year's time. Well....you can further analyse for yourself. Database : Oracle is defintely the most-wanted for salaried-people but not much outsourcing work. Guess only coorporates could afford Oracle requirements and resources.

Mobile : Symbian C++ should've been used instead of just Symbian, since Symbian is an OS but I've taken Symbian as a platform here on lines with J2ME and others - not merely as a programming language. J2ME relies on the Java language. Brew is again a platform on which developers can code in C, C++ or Java.

Operating System : I split Unix and Linux for the reason that these days people are specifically talking about Unix and Linux separately.

3D Graphics : Maya and 3D Studio Max have always been on top for a long time now.

Others : SAP is in great demand.

Overall, these are nice looking graphs with excellent textures, fill-patterns and gradients :). 2007 should be a great year for Human Resources in the IT industry.