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IN THIS ISSUE

MAIN FEATURE
The Aftermath of Y2K: What it Means for Programmers
By Punam Nair

FLASHBACK
Srinivas Ramanujan: The Man and the Genius
By Deepak Goyal

CAREER
The Exciting World of Software Testing
By Mikhail Portnov


Publisher’s Memo • Java World: Insider’s Tips • Opinion: These Murky Times
Law: H-1B Visas • Finance: Planning Ahead • Innovation: Internet Dosti
Communication: Media Revolution • Health: Dental Care • Yoga for A Techie's Life
Self Help: Guide to a Better Life • The Gift of Mentoring • Culture: What is Raga?
Bollywood • Telugu Cinema • Recipe: Shahi Paneer • Horoscope

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Publisher's Memo : Welcome to Our World



On the information superhighway, South Asians are in the fast lane. Nowhere is it more evident than in the heartland of the information technology revolution – Silicon Valley.

A torrent of skilled, intelligent South Asians – overwhelmingly Indian – are flooding into Silicon Valley, powering the IT industry here.

As the community grows, so does the need for media outlets that nurture it and help it flourish.

Several print and broadcast organizations have appeared over the years, eager to take on the challenge. Some do excellent work, too.

However, for a community that prides itself on its formidable technological prowess, oddly, science in general and information technology in particular takes a back seat in the community media. When these areas are covered, articles are often couched in esoteric language or relegated to the business pages.

We want to tell the stories of our community, explore the challenges it faces. We want to take a moment to look at the scientific heritage of South Asia.

We want to tell these stories in a way that is fun, accessible, responsible and informative.

And we want to do it with style.

We come from a region rich in its artistic heritage.

From Konarak to the Hoysala temples of Karnataka, from the exquisite Mughal miniature to folk art on the walls of humble Rajashtani adobe villages, art is part of our lives.

We want our publication to be a worthy representative of the land of the rangoli and kolam.

While we will have a special focus on technology and professionals who serve it, we wish to cast a wider net, as you will be able to tell when you peruse this magazine.

Our community is many splendored, and its interests are diverse. From law to health to Bollywood, nothing will escape our scrutiny.

We make no claims about presenting to you a perfect product, but we do say that we aim to put in your hands every month a magazine that will be the result be a labor of love.

In the end, you will decide whether our efforts are worthwhile. Our success depends on how well our relationship evolves.

Together, we can build a great magazine.

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Main Feature

The Aftermath of Y2K
What it Means for Programmers - By Punam Nair

The Y2K bug was a $100 billion bonanza for the infotech industry. Now as the hoopla dies down, how will programmers fare in the post-Y2K era? Punam Nair explores.

On January 1, 2000, airplanes didn’t stop in mid-air, grocery bills didn’t double, bank accounts still had funds. Traffic lights still worked, and our wired civilization survived pretty much intact.

Critics are beginning to wonder whether the Y2K problem – the potential inability of computers to read the year 2000 accurately was overhyped. All over the world, the glitches were more quirky than dangerous.

A 105-year old woman in Oslo, for instance, was offered a place in a Norwegian kindergarten after a millennium bug knocked a century off her age.

“When our list showed she was born in ‘94 we just assumed it was 1994 rather than 1894,” Olga Moerk, in charge of a project offering free day care to 5-year-olds in central Oslo, told Reuters.

A journalist in Germany’s Cologne checked his on-line banking account on New Year’s Day and an unexplained deposit of $1.56 billion (3 billion marks) beamed out at him from his computer screen. His joy, alas, was short-lived.

Up to 30,000 older model cash registers throughout Greece were hit by the Y2K bug and were printing receipts showing the year 1900, the Associated Press said, quoting media reports.

Hardly the stuff of a futuristic nightmare.

Even in the U.S., major Y2K glitches have included relatively minor problems: A Defense Department spy satellite system hobbled by a glitch on the ground; double-charging snafus in credit card processing; and a weather system shutdown in Chicago.

“I think there was too much hype made about Y2K,” says Paula Prusty, a computer engineer with FileNet Corp. a company based in, Orange County, Calif. Prusty, of Indian descent, has been a programmer for 13 years. Like many other programmers she was on call from Dec. 31 through Jan. 2.

If the transition was smooth, it came with quite a price tag: In the U.S., government agencies and the private companies threw money at the Y2K threat like there was no tomorrow: The Commerce Department estimated in November that combined U.S. private-sector and government Y2K upgrades would cost about $100 billion by next year, or about $365 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

As companies and agencies scrambled for competent hi-tech workers to pore through masses of programming to fix the Y2K bug, computer programmers had a field day. California alone spent more than $800 million on Y2K computer fixes, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Moinuddin Alamgir, a computer programmer who works for a company in Berkeley, Calif., had a close view at the ground level, though he hastened to add that he was a relative newcomer to the industry.

His company, which employs 350 people now, worked furioiusly to tackle the Y2K bug, Alamgir said. The infotech industry had to spend extra resources, he says, but a lot of it went to outsourcing and contractors who only hire programmers on a temporary basis.

India was a huge beneficiary, but a good number of Indian programmers also came to the U.S. on temporary visas to work on the Y2K bug.

Himanshu Pande, an SAP consultant with a software consulting group in Southern California, estimates that about 39,000 programmers were brought to America for the Y2K bug, but adds it is too soon to tell what the real figures are.

Now the Y2K honeymoon seems to be over. Y2K projects are being wrapped up, and according to the Orange County Register, 100,000 programmers were laid off in California during the first week of 2000.

Pande is not losing any sleep over Indian programmers running around for a job. He says most of the Indian programmers who were brought here were smart enough to realize that Y2K would only be temporary. “Many Indian programmers upgraded their skillls even before the transition,” Pande says. “They knew if they depended on Y2K for jobs, it would be short-lived.”

Anthony Dymond, who has been a contractor for programming projects for over 10 years, says the overall picture of Y2K and its effect on programmers is a bit complex.

“I think two things happened with Y2K,” says Dymond, whose company, Dymond & Associates LLC, is involved in projects of data-warehousing and data-mining.

“One was that all of the regular employers and contractors working in the field were diverted from their projects to Y2K projects. Secondly, there was a very large increase in demand for additional contractors for Y2K work.”

The flurry of new work that was generated either went offshore or went to programmers here.

While Y2K itself was a temporary project, the demise of the Y2K project will not necessarily result in dampening the programming job market, Dymond says. “Y2K has come to an end and a lot of these contractors have been released, but at the same time Y2K put a lot of other projects on hold – those projects are now going to be coming back online (and) will rehire a lot of the contractors.

“Secondly, during the Y2K problem, as projects went through remediation, a lot of them went through enhancements as well, and those enhancements have also created a lot of additional work.”

Programmers, he says, have little cause to worry. His confidence is borne out by the numbers. In 1999 Indians received 46 percent of all H1-B visas issued in the first six months.

The insatiable appetite of the U.S. for information technology professionals has resulted in the number of H-1B visas issued each year going up from slightly below 50,000 in 1992 to 115,000 in 1999.

“I think (computer programmers) are going to be in great demand,” Dymond said. “ There is a bit of a gap here as we close down Y2K and bring the other projects up – there is a period in here where people may have a hard time finding something to do or they might have to find something that was just a short-term job to tide them over, but as these other projects come back online, I think it will be fairly easy — at least in this area — because it is a very intense labor market here. There is a great demand for programmers.

“There is some discontinuity here and people might be moving around a little bit: I don’t think that it implies a glut of programmers. The amount of work that needs to be done is very large. I think that anybody who were to actively look for work would find work very shortly.”

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FLASHBACK:

Srinivasa Ramanujan
The Man and The Genius - By Deepak Goyal

“The mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, that has survived countless humanitarian arguments...was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.” So said his contemporary E.H. Neville. Deepak Goyal presents a profile.



Imagine an impoverished twenty- something clerk. His formal credentials were even less than modest. To put it bluntly, he had twice flunked the F.A. exam roughly equivalent to the U.S. high school diploma.

His poverty was grinding, and he was not always in good health. Hardly a resume to impress, but this man, who lived only till he was 32, went on to Cambridge and left a legacy in mathematics that is recognized today internationally as a lasting contribution.

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s contribution transcends mathematics. He presented an inspiration for his nation, then still ruled by the British, by proving by example that Indians were the intellectual equal of the West.

“Ramanujan’s career, just because he was a mathematician, is of unique importance to the development of relations between India and England,” according to his contemporary mathematician E.H. Neville, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

“India has produced great scientists, but (J.C.) Bose and (C.V.) Raman were educated outside India, and no one can say how much of their inspiration was derived from the great laboratories in which their formative years were spent and from the famous men who taught them.

“India has produced great poets and philosophers, but there is a subtle tinge of patronage in all commendation in alien literature.

“Only in mathematics are the standards unassailable, and therefore of all Indians, Ramanujan was the first whom the English knew to be innately equal of their greatest men.

“The mortal blow to the assumption, so prevalent in the Western world, that white is intrinsically superior to black, the offensive assumption that has survived countless humanitarian arguments and political appeals and poisoned countless approaches between England and India, was struck by the hand of Srinivasa Ramanujan.”

Born in December 1887 in the Tamil Nadu town of Erode, Ramanujan showed his precocious insights early on as a schoolboy.

In an arithmetic class, a teacher said: “If three bananas are given to three boys, each boy would get a banana.” The teacher generalized this idea. Then Ramanujan asked: “Sir, if no banana is distributed to no student, would everybody still get a banana?”

In his schooldays he was passionately involved with numbers, devising magic squares, and by the eighth grade he had mastered Loney’s Trigonometry, a standard undergraduate text.

When he was 16, he got hold of a book of pure mathematics, G.S. Carr’s A Synopsis of Elementary Results.

He passed the matriculation exam – equivalent to 10th grade – in 1904. Although he joined the Madras Govt. Arts College for its two-year pre-university F.A. program, his passion for mathematics at the expense of everything else cost him dearly.



The program covered English, Sanskrit, mathematics, physiology, and the history of Rome and Greece, but he was interested only in math.

He failed the year ending examination, and lost his scholarship in 1905.

He entered a very trying period of his life. He took the F.A. exam privately in 1907, but did not pass, despite getting a perfect score in math.

Between 1906-1912 Ramanujan was constantly in search of a benefactor and a job to support himself. He tutored students in mathematics in Kumbhakonam, later even sought employment as a tutor. He lamented to a friend that he was probably destined to die in poverty like Galileo.

Happily, he was proven wrong as a host of distinguished Indian and British math lovers joined hands in slowly but surely rescuing this brilliant mathematician from obscurity.

In 1910, Prof. Ramaswamy Iyer, founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, was at Salem. Ramanujan went to him and asked for a clerical job.

All he had was notebooks filled with magic squares, prime numbers, infinite series, divergent series, Bernoulli Numbers, Riemann Zeta Function, partitions, hypergeometric series.

Iyer was impressed. He sent Ramanujan to Madras with a letter of introduction to Prof. P.V. Seshu Iyer at Presidency College. Seshu Iyer, equally impressed, sent him to a lover of mathematics, Dewan Bahadur R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector in Nellore.



In December 1910 Ramanujan arrived at Nellore. This was the turning point.

Ramachandra Rao remembered Ramanujan as a “short uncouth figure, stout, unshaved, not overclean, with one conspicuous feature – shining eyes, (who) walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm.

“He was miserably poor. He had run away from Kumbhakonam to get leisure in Madras to pursue his studies.

“He never craved for any distinction. He wanted leisure, in other words, simple food to be provided for him.”

Rao undertook Ramanujan’s expenses in Madras for some time.

Meanwhile Seshu Iyer presented the earliest contributions of Ramanujan to the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.

Ramanujan lived in a small house in Madras, accepting reluctantly monthly assistance from the Nellore district collector for a year. Later, he declined assistance and ended up as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust.

S. Narayana Iyer, manager of the port trust, helped him. He was key in getting Ramanujan the lifelong support of Sir Francis Spring, chairman of the Madras Port Trust.

Narayana Iyer’s son recalls how his father and Ramanujan worked on math problems.

Every night his father and Ramanujan used to work on two big-sized slates, sitting in a parapet upstairs, till about 11:30 p.m., he said, ruefully adding that “it was a source of nuisance to other inmates who used to sleep in adjoining rooms. I distinctly remember the noise of the slate pencils which used to be background music for my sleep.

“I have seen Ramanujan get up at 2 o’clock in the night and note down something in the slate in the dull light of the hurricane lamp.

“He used to work at mathematics in his dreams and now he was jotting the results on the slate.”

At the suggestion of Seshu Iyer, Ramanujan wrote to Godfrey. H. Hardy, a world famous mathematician who was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a math lecturer at Cambridge.

Ramanujan wrote his historic letter Jan. 16, 1913, and thus began an enduring mathematical partnership.

Hardy’s reply dated Feb. 8 was the starting point of Ramanujan’s recognition in the Western world.

Dr. Gilbert T. Walker, a former Cambridge Trinity College fellow, during a visit to Madras, was impressed with Ramanujan’s work and wrote to the University of Madras registrar that Ramanujan’s work was “comparable in originality with that of a mathematics fellow in a Cambridge college, though lacking in the precision and completeness necessary in establishing the universal validity of the results.”

Walker said the university should enable Ramanujan for “a few years at least to spend the whole of his time on mathematics without any anxiety as to his livelihood.”

The university agreed, and in May 1913, the 26-year-old Ramanujan, who had failed its F.A. exam twice, became the University of Madras’s first research scholar with a stipend of Rs. 75 per month for two years.

Meanwhile in Cambridge, Hardy was keen to get Ramanujan there, even though Ramanujan was initially reluctant.

Mathematician E.H. Neville, another Trinity fellow, was a visiting lecturer to Madras in 1914.

Neville wrote to the governor of Madras, and the University of Madras agreed to give Ramanujan a scholarship.



Ramanujan changed his traditional Brahmin hairstyle of shaved head with tuft of hair and got his hair trimmed in European style, and left for England in March 1914.

Unfortunately his stay in England was overlapped by World War I, which may have resulted in his getting less attention than he deserved.

But Ramanujan’s mathematical acuity was never in doubt.

For instance, at a lecture of elliptical integrals at Cambridge, the instructor was working out some formulae. A glance at Ramanujan’s face, alight with excitement, caused him to ask whether he was following the lecture and whether he had anything to say. At this Ramanujan went to the blackboard and, much to everyone’s surprise, wrote down some of the results which were yet to be proved.

Life for an orthodox Brahmin was difficult in other ways, but Ramanujan persevered.

He initially asked for South Indian food items like tamarind and coconut oil by post parcel, as well as from a company in London but in January, 1915, he wrote to a friend: “Now as well as in the future I am not in need of anything, as I gained control over my taste and can live on mere rice with a little salt and lemon juice for an indefinite period.” Milk and fruits helped.

After about a year and a half in Cambridge, Hardy wrote to the University in Madras: “Ramanujan is beyond question the best Indian mathematician of modern times. He will always be rather eccentric, but of his extraordinary gifts there can be no questions.

“In some ways, he is the most remarkable mathematician I have ever known.”

In June 1916, in an official report Hardy wrote to the to registrar: “It is already safe to say that Mr. Ramanujan has justified abundantly all the hopes that were based upon his work in India and has shown that he possesses powers as remarkable in their way as those of any living mathematician.”

Although his health was reasonably good for the first three years in Cambridge, in May 1917, he was first admitted to Cambridge nursing hostel for five months. He suffered from night fever, malaise, weight loss and fits of depression so severe that he once tried to commit suicide. Modern biographers speculate that he might have been suffering from amebiasis.

He was in and out of tuberculosis sanatoria. After considerable treatment for TB, he improved in 1918.

In the same year he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and elected to a Trinity College fellowship worth £250 annually for six years, both firsts for an Indian.

After five years in Cambridge, he left England in February 1919.

He arrived in India four weeks later – pale, emaciated, but with a scientific standing and reputation unprecedented for an Indian.

At his request, the University of Madras granted him a scholarship of 250 pounds a year for five years.

Unfortunately his health did not improve.

He relapsed, with severe bouts of stomach pain, depression, and even had a premonition of his death. He was brought for expert medical treatment in January 1920. His end came April 26, 1920. He was 32 years, 4 months and 4 days.



His achievement outlived his death and continued to inspire Indians. Nobel laureate astrophysicist Subramanyam Chandrashekhar said in a lecture: “Perhaps the best way I can give you a feeling for what Ramanujan meant to the young men going to schools and colleges during the period 1915-1930 is to recall for you in the way in which I first learned of Ramanujan’s name. It had been a day in April 1920 when I was not quite 10 years old when my mother told me of an item in the newspaper of a famous Indian mathematician, Ramanujan by name, (who) had died the preceding day.

“Though I had no idea at that time of what kind of mathematician Ramanujan was, or indeed what scientific achievement meant, I can still recall the gladness I felt on the assurance that one brought up under circumstances similar to my own, could have achieved what I could not grasp.

“I think it is fair to say that almost all the mathematicians who reached distinction during the three or four decades following Ramanujan were directly or indirectly inspired by his example.”

Ramanujan’s contribution to mathematics is hard to describe in nontechnical terms, but what can be said is that his reputation has become internationally secure over the years.

In 1927, Cambridge published 355 pages of Ramanujan’s Collected Works of almost everything he published and the floodgates opened as the wider mathematical world took notice. In the next few years dozens of papers like “Two Assertions Made by Ramanujan,” “Note on a Problem of Ramanujan,” appeared in journals.

Ramanujan’s hypothesis or the Tau Conjecture, presented in a 1916 paper, kept mathematicians in knots until Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne proved it in 1974, an event described as “one of the celebrated events of 20th century mathematics,” which won Deligne the Field Prize, the mathematician’s Nobel prize.

A 1917 Hardy-Ramanujan paper is considered the founding document in the field of probabilistic number theory.

“For the decade ending in 1988, a computer search of the literature revealed, some three hundred papers referred to Ramanujan in their titles or their abstracts,” according to Ramanujan biographer Robert Kanigel.

Norwegian Atle Selberg, the world’s most famous number theorist, came upon an article by Ramanujan in 1934.

He has said that it was “a revelation – a completely different world to me, quite different from any mathematics book I had ever seen – with much more appeal to the imagination. It was really what gave the impetus which gave the impetus which started my own mathematical work.”

Later his father presented him with his own copy of the collected papers of Ramanujan which he carries with him still.

“That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan – He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover,” says mathematician Freeman Dyson, who first discovered Ramanujan’s work in the 1940s. “In the years since that happy day, I have been intermittently coming back to Ramanujan’s garden. Every time when I come back, I find fresh flowers blooming.”

- Deepak Goyal is a freelance writer.
He is based in Calcutta, India.

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So, who are those thousands upon thousands of software testers filling the cubicles of Sillicon Valley software companies? You may well be scratching you head right now, wondering whether something has changed since your college days, and whether now there is actually an undergraduate degree in that field offered by accredited colleges and universities. Please trust me when I say: “There isn’t.” If you want to get trained in the field all you have available in the Bay Area are just about 5 or 6 relatively small vocational schools, which together release to the job market no more than 1,000 graduates a year. Half of them, by the way, are very far from being fluent in English. How do I know? I am running one of the schools.

Among software testers, then, there are a lot of people who do not have degrees either in Computer Science or even in related fields such as Electronics or Mathematics. The fact of the matter is that one could be an excellent software tester with professional or educational background in accounting, music, teaching, biology, foreign languages, health sciences, mechanical engineering, … you name it.

So why is Software Testing so attractive to people from all walks of life, striving to enter the computer industry? There are several reasons:

Previous professional experience counts.

For example, those with experience in accounting, bookkeeping, banking, finance, or economics have a greater probability of getting hired by a company that produces financial software, than someone with a degree in computer science and no financial background. A working knowledge of the professional area, of its specificity, will produce a better tester than in-depth knowledge of computer programming. For thousands of testing jobs programming skills are not a must. I personally know at least 20 software testers with backgrounds in microbiology, biochemistry, medicine and pharmaceutical fields. Almost all of them are working for companies producing software for healthcare, the pharmaceutical industry and medical research.

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to learn the profession.

All it takes is just hard work and determination. If these are in place, then 200 hours of training is all a beginner needs to learn the field and enter the job market. People with solid user skills can achieve the same results after only 100-120 hours of training. This does not include the thousands of people who found jobs without any training at all. Sometimes fluency in Japanese or stock brokerage experience in combination with basic computer skills is more than enough to get a job as software tester.

Age does not matter much.

If an experienced 50 year old accountant asks me about his chances of becoming an entry-level Java developer after taking some classes, I would say – good luck. At the same time, I know many people well over 50 who have successfully entered the software testing arena after short-term training at my school.

Software testing jobs are well-paid jobs.

An experienced software tester in today’s job market can earn around $100,000 per year. Beginners with a college degree (in some field, not necessarily computer science) may easily count on $40K+ a year. People with two-three years of experience and an aggressive marketing strategy can hope for an income in the $50K-75K a year range. I won’t deceive you – testers certainly make less than developers, but, on the other hand, their job isn’t nearly as intensive either.

Companies are willing to sponsor H-1B visas for software testers.

Among the people entering the software testing field there is a significant numberes of foreign nationals (holders of H4 visas) whose spouses are authorized to work in the United States. Many of them are highly educated and are willing to work. One has to also consider the difference between one and two adult incomes per family may be the difference between renting an apartment and buying a house.

The software testing boom continues as we speak. The Land of Opportunities is offering those who are used to hard work and have passion for quality another chance. Does that describe you?

- Mikhail Portnov has 10 years experience in the
Software Programming Industry. He is based in Mountain View, Calif.

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JAVA WORLD: Getting Ahead with Java: Savvy Insider Tips - By Marian Corcoran Java is hot, and we are not talking about gourmet coffee. But how is this cutting edge programming language being used in the real world? Marian Corcoran gives examples with a few tips on what today’s ambitious programmer needs to keep in mind to get ahead in the dizzy ever-changing world of the Internet.

Programmers worked hard to make sure that the world kept running after we hit the 2000 mark. Those who were involved did wonderful work.

It turned out not to be the end of life as we know it, but the beginning of a new century filled with both challenges and successes. It is now time to look to the future and prepare entry into the new millennium.

For many of you in the information technology industry, it means moving deeper into the Web and using important programming languages such as Java and C++.

In this article you will see some sample areas of current applications and learn what skills will put you in a strong position to do well in this field.

Industry reports forecast a need for about one million new developers and Web engineers in the next five years. This is “growth industry,” with the Web slated to continue growing at a phenomenal rate.

People often ask me: “How is all this technology being used in the real world?” A great place to find an answer is a Web site where Sun Microsystems lists current applications: http://industry.java.sun.com/casestudies/

Large security training operations such as Salomon Smith Barney; the nation’s largest provider of home healthcare services, Home Medical of America and GTE currently use Java applications.

There are now hundreds of pure Java applications in use throughout the world in all different areas including financial, health care and scientific applications as well as defense work. My favorite application is the Java software used in an observatory in Australia.

Now that you are convinced that Java and the Web are in the real world and here to stay, what are the important topics you need to understand to do serious Web development?

• Java, the programming language.
  
• Webscripting languages such as HTML, XML, CGI and Perl which are used to create Web pages.
  
• UML or the Unified Modeling Language which is a standard notation for doing design work in Java.
  

The Java programming language was developed at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s by James Gosling with support from his associates. Java was first used in consumer electronics and unexpectedly took off when the internet had a clear need for a programming language that was platform independent. What this means is that the language must work on different operating systems and on computers in the same way an internet software works on all of them. If your company has a Web site, you want customers with PCs to be able to access it, as well as those who might work on a Solaris or SGI platform.

Webscripting languages are used to instruct a Web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer how to display the different items in the page. I first saw HTML or Hypertext Markup Language when I was doing some research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology about 15 years ago. (Note: Some people don’t consider HTML to be a Webscripting language, but since it is used for display on the Web, I am including it here.)

At that time, HTML was used to display pages. If you had a page with a topic on American presidents, you could click on any name and find out more information about that president. Today, things have become more sophisticated. These pages can change in response to user input. If you are conducting stock transactions, you could select different stocks and prices to be shown. The information on the page would change with each user request for a stock.

UML or the Unified Modeling language, also developed in the last decade, is a special notation for doing design work in Java. For example, before you write your code, you would first design your program and then generate some of the code which you would later fill in. The notation is a good way to design a system as well as to learn about one after it has been created.



Now that you know the sample applications and what you need to learn, where do you go to learn about them? I am biased of course, as I teach at Technical University of Silicon Valley http://www.centeradv.com/catalog where we have developed a good program for learning the latest in these technologies at very reasonable prices. This is especially helpful for those who must pay their way or are coming from other countries and are not yet working. I also like the JavaSoft site http://www.javasoft.com where they are doing excellent work in developing material to demonstrate the different libraries they are creating for this new technology.

Well, you have seen the applications, what you need to learn and where you need to learn it. What are you waiting for? Get going.

– Nandini Pal is vice president of GlobeWire NorthAmerica, Inc.

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LEGAL ISSUES: H-1B Visa: What You Need to Know - By Raja Ahluwalia The H-1B visa is issued to temporary workers with special skills. It is a topic of intense interest to infotech professionals seeking to work in the U.S. and eventually gain permanent residency. Check the accuracy of your knowledge with this informative look presented by attorney Raja Ahluwalia.

What is H-1B Visa?

It is an employment or work visa. People from a country outside the United States, who would like to work in the United States temporarily to perform services in a “specialty occupation,” may apply for an H-1B visa.

Basic Qualifications

The following criteria must be met:

• You intend to enter the United States temporarily.
  
  
• You do intend to abandon your foreign residence.
  
  
• You are coming to the United States to work in a “specialty occupation” and you are qualified in that job by a degree or its equivalency.
  
  
• The position at your job must meet one of the following four criteria:
  
  
  • You must work in a job that requires at least a university degree;
    
    
  • The degree requirement must be common to the field for parallel positions among similar organizations or, the position is so complex or unique that it can only be performed by someone with a degree;
    
    
  • The employer normally requires a degree or its equivalent for this position;
    
    
  • The specific duties must be so specialized and complex that the knowledge needed to perform the duties is usually associated with obtaining the degree.
    

Who can sponsor

An employer can be any person, firm, corporation, contractor, or other association or organization in the United States that enters into an employer-employee relationship with you. The employer must have an IRS identification number, a need and the financial ability to meet the obligation.

If the employer is from another country, he may use a United States agent to act on his behalf in hiring you as an employee. The United States agent may be the beneficiary’s employer, the representative of both the employer and the beneficiary of the petition, or some individual or entity acting for or in place of the employer.

Can I sponsor myself?

Individuals cannot petition for themselves. You can be the beneficiary of more than one H-1B petition and work less than full-time on one or more H-1B jobs. And if you own your company and the company meets the above-referenced requirements, it can sponsor you.

The employer must submit a certification from the Department of Labor showing that it has successfully filed a labor condition application with DOL, which makes certain statements, about complying with several reasonable requirements. The employer also has to meet with several record-keeping requirements.

The employer must also submit documentation of the applicant’s H-1B qualifications.

Establishing that one is a qualified “specialty occupation” worker

A person must have a U.S. degree or a foreign degree that is determined by experts to be the equivalent of an U.S. degree. A person must submit the academic degree, legible copies of school records, diplomas, or transcripts. This documentation can be supplemented by affidavits from school officials and with school catalog excerpts giving course descriptions.

You can show that you have the education, specialized training, or experience that is equivalent to the training acquired by attainment of a bachelor’s or higher degree. The employer must show that the position needs to have a degree requirement and a description of the duties that highlights that the job title fits the actual duties that the employee will perform.

The employee must submit diplomas or other university credentials showing that the employee has the appropriate degree(s). The employee must submit legible copies of school records, diplomas, and transcripts. The employee can submit affidavits from school officials and special awards won. The employee can also include school catalog excerpts giving course descriptions.

Duration of visa

The initial H-1B petition is granted for three years. Extensions of stay are granted for up to three additional years. Therefore, you can remain in the United States for a total of six years.

Filing procedures

The employer must be an U.S. employer and can be a person, firm, corporation, contractor or other association or organization in the United States with an IRS tax identification number. And the employer must file the H-1B petition with the INS on Form I-129 and its H supplement along with the company support letter. The employer must give you a company letter of support. Here, the employer must describe your job duties for the position; and detail its usual practice (or the usual practice of the industry) in only hiring specialty occupation personnel for the position. The employer needs to explain why it needs the services of a specialty occupation worker. The employer should also discuss your prior education, training, or experience to show that you have the credentials required by the H-1B category. The employer must also submit the employment contract or a summary of the agreement. The summary should have a statement of the temporariness of your employment.

The filing fee for Form I-129 is $110, whether it is an initial petition, an amended petition, an application for a change of status, or an application for an extension of stay.

Most employers who file H-1B petitions on or after Dec. 1, 1998, and before Oct. 1, 2001, must also submit a special H-1B fee of $500 when they file for an initial grant of H-1B status; an initial extension of stay for individuals currently in H-1B status; or authorization for a change in H-1B employers for individuals currently in H-1B status.

The H-1B petition can be filed up to six months before you intend to begin employment. It is suggested that you file no later than 45 days before you intend to begin employment.

Getting an extension of stay

A request for a petition extension cannot be filed if the visa has expired. The maximum time given on the initial H-1B petition is three years. Extensions of stay up to three additional years can be obtained. Therefore, the maximum limit of stay is six years. Any further extension is not possible.

If you have “overstayed” your period of authorized admission, you will be required to submit your visa application at the consulate located in the country of your citizenship. A third country consulate will not process the application unless you can establish “extraordinary circumstances.”

Renewal of visa

If you travel abroad after expiration of your original H-1B visa and you want to reenter the United States you must obtain a new visa. You can renew your visa in person at the United States consulate. You must submit documentation that all the pertinent facts regarding the treaty business remain the same.

If you are currently maintaining a valid H-1B status and were previously issued an H-1B visa prior to admission to the United States then you can seek renewal of the H-1B visa through the Visa Office in Washington, D.C. This is unavailable to people whose status has been changed to the H-1B category after initial admission to the United States, because those people have not yet obtained a visa in the new category at a consulate. In order to obtain the renewed visa by the Visa you must intend to travel outside of the United States and will reenter with the new visa after a temporary absence abroad.

Change of employers

When you change employers and want to continue maintaining your H-1B status the case is treated as an extension of stay and a new petition has to be filed.

Several Employers

If you have H-1B status for one employer and you want to work for a new employer the second employer must file Form I-129 and H supplement to obtain INS permission for the employment.