The Early Days

I began watching Formula One as a kid because my father used to watch it. The lure of cars and names like “Ferrari” and “Mercedes” was too great for a boy that age not to be fascinated. It was exciting to see cars running at those speeds try to overtake and battle with each other, sometimes losing their grip and sliding off the track. I didn’t understand the sport much, but even then, I somehow knew that Kimi Räikkönen was a good driver. His aggression and sheer pace even in that not-so-glamorous and slow Sauber was mesmerising. By the time news broke that he was to drive for McLaren, I was already a massive fan; the switch was the final straw. He was young, silent, media-shy and brimming with obvious talent. All this is in retrospect, of course. At that age, all I knew was he was really, really fast.

His years at McLaren were undoubtedly his best. The things he could do with a car, I’ve yet to see another man bend a machine to his will the same way. Unfortunately, while he gave the team his best, the team didn’t reciprocate. Adrian Newey’s historically fast but fragile cars ruined Kimi’s chances not once, but twice, of becoming a world champion. We could have easily had a triple world champion in him, if not the number of reliability stricken races he drove. It’s easy to forget drives that don’t win. But if one rewinds the years and watches those drives again¹, the genius is pretty obvious. From driving straight between two cars, out-breaking and overtaking them both, to simply out-racing a faster Ferrari with sheer grit — the car felt like an extension of his own body. Kimi has done it all, and done it in style.

The move to Ferrari was the beginning of the end. I don’t think anyone saw that coming, especially when Kimi won the ‘07 championship. One would think that when your newly appointed driver who has shown so much promise before, wins the driver’s championship for you the first year of his employment, you would respect him even more and do as much as you can for him. But Ferrari showed its true colours yet again. I’ve been a staunch anti-Ferrari fellow from, probably, the second year I started watching Formula One. They not only made the sport boring, but I’ve never seen any other team get away with cheating so blatantly before or since. They might have had the dream combination and I have no doubt that they would have won even if they didn’t mess around, but just the fact they did leaves a really bad taste in the mouth. I don’t care about Ferrari’s dominance and all that jazz about being solely a racing team. They’re purely businessmen first. It’s become very obvious as the years have got on.

Ferrari began developing the F2008 towards Massa, probably because Kimi was doing so well. Only Ferrari knows the real story, but my bet is they wanted Massa to do well too since he was known to be a bad handler of the car, and the only way to do that was develop the car to suit his style while expecting Kimi to just adapt because he was so good. Unfortunately that strategy didn’t pay off and in the second half Kimi’s performance began to visibly deteriorate. Ironically, he seemed to have brought reliability issues with him to Ferrari’s camp, a constructor which was considered the pinnacle of reliable cars which had helped it to countless constructors championships. That, coupled with sheer bad luck (Canada and Belgium ‘08) saw Kimi drop out of contention while Massa climbed in. That didn’t stop Kimi from trying, and trying hard enough to make a mistake and land up in the barriers. There wasn’t a single race where he didn’t give his car all he had even if the car didn’t respond.

A New Beginning

I don’t want to compare drivers. That leads to endless arguments and debates. Instead, I want to remember Kimi for what he gave the sport. He gave Formula One a real racer. One who didn’t like the glamour or the spotlight. One who just wanted to drive a fast car and win races. There isn’t a single world champion in recent history who has had a speck-free career, but Kimi Räikkönen gave us such a champion. A calm but aggressive driver with a mind always calculating, he always pushed his opponent to force him into making a mistake. He was the perfect predator. Formula One has been inhumanly unfair to one of its most deserving sons, but that’s how things go sometimes and we all just have to live with it, not think about it too much and move on. The Kimi we’ve all come to love and admire would tell us so.

I want to thank him for a decade of some of the best, most skilled, entertaining and exciting moments in sports. I hope he moves on to better things, and only because one can never know which way life goes, hope to see him in a Formula One car and be a world champion again someday. But till then, it’s goodbye Ice-man. The grid will not be the same without you.

It was the iPhone again that kick started things with OS 3.0 though, and then came the new iMacs. The excitement is not back to what it used to be, but that’s only because of the expectations that Apple has infused in us over the years.

Microsoft’s effort

On the other hand, I find nothing really exciting about Windows 7. Sure, the OS is faster, but we saw all this in Vista and most of it back in XP. It was a little exciting back then, but it definitely isn’t exciting now. The first concepts of Longhorn — now those were exciting (which is quite an understatement really, and I would love to see a Linux distro try to be like it)! Aero is a gimmick; eye-candy that doesn’t translate to increased usability and productivity is worse than useless. The speed boosts don’t count for much because all they do is allow you to do the same things that you were doing in Windows XP, just a little bit faster. Okay, I have touch-stuff now, but that’s useless because my screen isn’t touch sensitive (as I’m sure a lot of people’s screens aren’t). I can’t do anything in 7 that I couldn’t in XP. It’s the same old shit. Microsoft has failed to give people a reason to upgrade¹.

Ironically, the same things can be said about Snow Leopard. But here’s the reason people don’t: because they don’t feel it. Apple innovated like crazy in Tiger, enough to just have to improve upon them in Leopard. And they’re so good, intuitive and actually usable that they still feel new. With Snow Leopard, it took the already-feel-new things, and made them faster while adding a little more sheen along the way. I have yet to upgrade to 10.6, so I’ll save the deeper analysis till I do. But starting up Windows 7 today still feels the same as it did back with XP². If this is the OS that is going to take the PC into the next decade, I truly feel sorry for them.

Apple’s fight

All that personal commentary aside, I acknowledge that everyone who matters has heralded 7 as something that both Microsoft and Apple need right now. Microsoft, to save itself from becoming truly irrelevant; Apple, because competition is good for everyone (or so is the official party line). But I don’t think Apple and Microsoft are competing even in the same sphere anymore. If they are, then Apple has already won this round. iPods have beaten the Zune to pulp, you don’t need a link to a market share graph for that (and the last time I heard about the ZuneHD was a month back when it launched). Windows Mobile is the most irrelevant smartphone OS ever, and the Mac has 91% of market for $1,000+ PCs where it competes seriously. Apple’s stock has received enough attention for its historical upswing that pushed it higher than the $200 mark it hit 2 years ago, and it tops the charts for customer satisfaction. Yes, Apple has won this battle.

Their real rivals are the hardware manufacturers. People buy a Dell, not a Microsoft computer. But they’ve all conceded revenue for market share, and only now have they begun to realise the hole they’ve dug themselves into. Apple is a low-volume high-profit/revenue player which doesn’t care for market share for the Mac. I won’t say it don’t care about market share at all, because clearly it’s going for volume with the iPhone as it did with the iPod. But here too, it’s the only one who seems to be able to do so without cutting into its profits. But for Macs, Apple is playing to its strengths and it’s working out just fine. While analysts can keep saying that it’s losing out on an opportunity by not entering the netbook market, Apple continues to show them the finger in its own classy way.

Further reading: Value of Apples.

But Apple is the only one running its race. No other company works the way Apple does — making hardware and software, and operating its own brick and mortar stores. Every other company either just makes the hardware, or writes the software. Nobody sells their own stuff themselves. Microsoft is trying to make an entry in that area³. We’ll see how that goes. But the major point here is that Apple does things differently, and that’s why they win. They get points for just being unique in an industry that follows a follower.

Apple will probably never become as big as Microsoft did, but they will definitely be more relevant and important. That’s because they’re not driven by money or power. Sure, it’s a big part of what they do. But there are truly passionate people at Apple who do things to change the world they live in. Apple has become big by being small, but they will become bigger by remaining Apple.

The Lectures

I started with my lectures and lab sessions, and the description I came up with to explain them to my parents is probably the best way to say it — the lecturers and professors sound like they know what they’re talking about. They’re actually good at explaining topics in a way that makes them easy to understand. They don’t teach a lot of topics at one go. It’s more about quality than quantity, which is such a big plus. That seems to be reflected in the time-table as well, where I don’t have more than 3 hours of lectures on any given day — and that includes days with 2-3 hour lab sessions. That’s a huge change from the 9 to 4 schedule that I used to have. Proof that you don’t need more hours of contact time¹ to get better results. It does make it hard sometimes to figure out what to do with the free hour between lectures, but thankfully there aren’t too many of those. The time-tables aren’t fixed though, and they change from week to week. Some might think it’s painful to have an ever changing routine, but I for one appreciate the flexibility. It allows for better scheduling and less hassles for the people making the time-table as well. I can’t really put my finger on why I prefer it, but I like it this way.

The curriculum is interesting, so say the least. Maybe it’s just a psychological effect of being in a new environment of study, but it feels like there is a purpose to what we’re learning². There’s some level of harmony between the lectures and the lab sessions. However, I do question the need to learn “Java”, especially when we will switch to “C” soon. It was and will remain a terrible tool; my lectures aren’t doing anything to change my perception. The Maths is easy, because it’s at a high-school level for me, but I am not complaining about that. I appreciate understanding the basics all over again if it means I’ll understand them better. We don’t have any “Physics” per se, which is a massive bonus. We have “Engineering” that takes the mathematical parts and the upper layers of Physics without going too deep into it. For example (and I’ll state an example our lecturer gave), knowing that electrons flow in a conductor is Engineering, but learning about the drift velocity of electrons, what the conductor is made of and how that affects the flow is Physics. We’re not studying to be physicists. You have no idea how sweet a music that is to my ears.

The lecture halls themselves are pretty good. Big and spacious. Not too different from what I had in Manipal (which says something about Manipal’s efforts at upgrading the infrastructure), except that lecturers make full use of the technology and equipment given in the room. I need to walk a little between lectures, since they’re almost never in the same room one after the other, but it’s nice to be able to stretch my legs after sitting for 50 minutes. I began taking in my computer to my Java and Engineering lectures since it’s easier to annotate the PDFs lecturers put up on the University’s virtual learning environment (called LUVLE). Keeps things in context. Understandably there’s no need for a computer in Maths. I will admit to being guilty of twittering from class, but that was from a Java lecture which was getting pretty ridiculous. I don’t let myself get distracted.

The Self-study

The assignments to be handed in were swift to come. We get assignments in our tutorials that need to be handed in the following week — about 4 days per assignment. In fact, I had my first assignment even before the term began, but it was a revision sheet so it wasn’t too harmful. I like the assignments here. They’re nothing too hard, and they’re not too long. Just enough of each so that it can be finished in a couple of sittings at the maximum. It’s annoying when assignments run into 40 something questions that are essentially just picked out from various books and solve no academic purpose. Plus, long assignments beg for procrastination because they’re just so boring. Thankfully, it’s not the case here. In fact, I find myself looking forward to them some times. That’s probably because I can complete them and I like that sense of achievement.

We’re supposed to spend 3 hours on self-study for every 1 hour of contact time. That seems to be the unwritten or unspoken rule here. I don’t spend 9 hours studying every day, obviously. But the emphasis on learning and understanding things on our own is a new concept. It feels nice to be given that kind of independence where there isn’t a teacher standing on your head or breathing down your neck. Some people might need that to get the job done, but most of them don’t.

The Entertainment

I joined 2 societies — RocSoc and LUGS — but haven’t been to any of the socials yet. I have also been eyeing the Philosophy Society, but I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to make for it. RocSoc’s socials seem to be mostly bar crawls and local gigs (whenever they happen). I’ll probably go for the gigs, but bars aren’t my cup of tea. I do plan on going for the LUGS meetings though, as soon as I get around to installing Windows on my Macbook Pro again. LUGS is pretty much about LAN parties, which sound like fun, except that I haven’t really gamed in a while. I plan to buy one of the new (rumoured) wired Apple Mice so that I can play properly. I have some of the games they play (Counter-Strike, Command and Conquer) and will hopefully get my hands on the ones that I don’t. 6+ hours of gaming can’t be bad, right?

I managed to have something called an Ulnar Nerve entrapment, which has incapacitated my left hand a little. Hence, less playing the guitar for me. Hopefully it’ll fix itself soon.

There’s also a band evening on Wednesdays in the bar in my college. I’d like to go for one of them if I can remember it on time and not be lazy about it. Maybe even play there once in the 3 years that I’ll be here. There’s plenty of scope for music from what I’m seeing at first glance, but it’ll involve me not being lazy about it.

I’ve been downtown once, for a welcome dinner from the faculty. I’m still not comfortable with the place and the roads, and since buses are the only viable means of transportation it makes for a very uncomfortable outing. I’ll probably start ranking up my phone bills once I start going into town because I’ll be spending so much time with the GPS and maps trying to stay oriented. Public transport remains my Achilles heel even across continents. I’ll have more to say about it when I get around more.

The Special Mention

Throwing in a quick mention of my food and how I’m surviving here. I haven’t got around to cooking anything — it just doesn’t seem too exciting to spend half an hour making something that takes 15-20 minutes to eat up. Ready-made food is much more inviting — the microwave-or-add-hot-water kind. Even eating out isn’t as expensive as I thought it would be. Of course, it’s more expensive than what I had in Manipal, but it’s pretty affordable by British cost-of-living standards. Approximately £5 for a 7-inch ham and pineapple pizza is pretty decent I would say. And a 9-inch is about £7.

I’ve also begun keeping chocolates with me (dark, mint flavoured). I alternate between “After Eight” (my favourites) and “Divine”. After Eight’s are more minty, and Divine’s are more chocolate-y. They’re both pretty delicious, so it mostly depends on my mood as to which one I have. These too are decently priced, costing around £1.30-1.50 for a normal 4x10 size bar. One lasts me for about 4 days.

The Conclusion

It’s been an interesting first week even though nothing out of the ordinary happened. Sometimes it’s just better that way — for things to be normal — when everything else is so brand new and different. I hope to get around to doing most of the things I’ve planned. They will surely liven things up a little more. But even if it continues this way, I don’t think I’ll have too many complaints.

My father and I flew Emirates, since we didn’t want to change airports at London to catch our connecting. The journey was more or less pleasant, with in-flight movies making sure the time passed quickly. I barely got any sleep that day, since I woke up at 6 AM IST and slept at 11 PM BST. We got a room in a small Bed & Breakfast in Morecambe (called Glenthorne) since my father needed a place to stay for just a few days while he helped me settle in. I moved in to the halls of residence the next day to begin getting used to taking care of myself again as soon as possible. Being at home for more than half a year doesn’t help that at all.

More pictures of Lancaster University at the Lancaster University pool on Flickr.

The very first thing that struck me was that the people here are actually nice. It might have something to do with the fact that Lancaster is more of a village-town and the university campus is three and a half miles away from the city; the place hasn’t been urbanised. Or it may just be that living in India has lowered my standards of judging people. I have said more “thank you”s here in the past 5 days that I have in the past 3 years. It’s really just the smallest things — from holding the door open to suggesting alternatives to some thing. There is a hint of patience in people here, which really helps when you’re in an entirely new place where things are done almost entirely differently to how you’ve been used your whole life. I might even go as far as to say that this place might make me a tad nicer as a person if I’m not careful.

The place itself is absolutely beautiful. I was used to the green from being in Manipal for so long, but this is what it must truly feel like to be around nature. It rains quite a bit¹, so everything looks fresh almost all the time. It’s just the correct amount of cold this time of year, so a simple combination of jacket and jeans does the trick for the day (lecture theatres are warm enough to not need the jacket). It’s a beautiful assortment of blue, grey and green that makes me want to be outside more than in my room. Of course, I’d spent time outside if I had something to do (which I shall from tomorrow, as my classes start then), but the lack of traffic and bustle of people is very inviting.

I had a chance to travel to and from Preston and Morecambe in the little time that I’ve been here, and the drives were quite relaxing. We usually say that overpopulation is the bane of a country, but you don’t realise exactly how bad it is until you see the alternative. Except the occasional traffic jam because a road is being repaired or you’re bang in the middle of the office rush hour, you can just fly here. Speed limits are 50 mph on the regular roads and 70 mph on the motorway. Those translate roughly to 70 kmph and 90 kmph — speeds almost unheard of in India. Here, cars feel like cars. Of course, I don’t need to get into the massive boost in the quality of cars I see here too. Although I did see the WagonR, Fusion (called something else here) and my father pointed out a Swift as well.

I haven’t yet gotten around to getting a hang of the public transport system (which is mainly the bus), but I hope to do it soon enough so that I can use it effectively when I need to. I can’t be using a cab to go everywhere — they’re ridiculously expensive.

Like I said before, I’m staying in the halls of residence. I picked my room on the outskirts of the university campus, because it’s just quieter here and has less people-traffic. It does mean I need to leave for lectures about 10 minutes early since they’re a little far away, but that’s a very small payoff for keeping my sanity. In fact, I’m in the last building of my accommodation area, which is called the County College (I’m still coming to terms with the terminology used here, e.g. the difference between the university and college), and on the topmost floor. I don’t think I could be more isolated. All of that, and the fact that my room was a pleasant surprise (to say the least) means that I should have a very comfortable first year. I knew it would be better than what I was used to, but I didn’t expect to be this good. It’s almost like I’m in a constant tussle between spending time out and in my room, because they’re both so inviting. Once the little bit of construction going on around my building gets over, it’ll be a gem of a place to stay.

I haven’t yet met any of my professors, since classes haven’t begun yet, but I again keep no expectations. My friends here have told me that the curriculum is easier than what I’ve been used to in India, so that’s a good thing. I just hope to be able to find my lecture theatres in time, since the maps aren’t really that helpful; with the construction going on there are detours all over the place that keep throwing me off. Hopefully I’ll get used to it soon enough.

Going back over everything for a proof-read, it’s interesting to observe that I have nothing significantly bad to say about Lancaster and the university. Not yet at least. That’s what happens when one approaches something without expectations. There’s no disappointment, or it’s absolutely minimal. But I don’t think this place could have disappointed me even if I had expected anything from it. There are many things to like about Lancaster, and I’ve just touched a few of them that were glaringly obvious. It’ll be nice to come back to this in a year’s time and see if and how my view changes.

While I was at Manipal, I took a year off from college to work. I was still in college, but I was more focused on working; doing something meaningful and productive. While the time spent was definitely productive, I’m still debating if it was really as meaningful as I would have wanted it to be. Regardless, I have no regrets, and there’s a certain charm in taking life as it comes. I left my job to bring back the focus on completing my degree, and the first thing to do that was to enrol in a University again; bring myself back to take things one step at a time.

A really brief history

I applied to a lot of colleges, and I was accepted at most of them. Lancaster University was the best choice out of them. They offered me my first preference — BEng. Hons. Computer Systems Engineering — which was nice, since I’ve never been an academically strong student, so I had almost resigned to a thought of graduating with a BSc. degree. I did not want to go to the United States to continue my education — I was pretty clear on that. So UK was the best choice, and I know quite a few people at Lancaster, so that was a rather obvious decision. I was accepted at Newcastle and Southampton as well, but I decided to stay with the familiar. This was, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

The amount of paper work that needs to be completed for these things is not a joke. It almost makes one wonder exactly when will these things become completely electronic. But then again, it’s better they aren’t if it means that I have to get out of my house and get some physical activity done. By the end of it all, I’ve become rather closely acquainted with Nehru Place and the people at the various offices over there. Thankfully, none of the documents (my education visa, bank drafts etc.) were hard to get and things went along smoothly. I wasn’t expecting them to, knowing the people here and their ways, but it helps to know people in the right places as I’ve come to realise again and again.

So after about three months of running back and forth, learning life lessons in dealing with people and “getting the job done”, here I am. I leave the country (and continent, if we’re establishing territories) tomorrow for the next three years while I study to become an engineer. It’s a little bittersweet, as these things usually go. I will miss home more this time around since I’m leaving everything familiar behind — the weather, the people, the food, the language. I don’t like change. Not in a big way at least. But small changes don’t significantly affect things. I believe that if something good has to come out of me, then a big change is the way to go. It helps fortify a resolve if we start from the beginning, with memories and past-experiences of incompetence and failures behind us. Hence, big changes and reboots are pretty hard to come by, and that’s why they make a difference.

So what happens now?

Even though it’s ‘09, anyone going to a foreign university from here still carries lots of expectations with him. I guess it’s more about a case of “he’s getting a better opportunity than we did”, so we’re expected to achieve more. I’ve never been the expectation-fulfilling kind, however. But I plan to make the most of this, and that means getting rid of almost all distractions. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt the past few years, is that there’s a time and place for everything¹.

There shouldn’t be any change in my Internet habits, since that’s just a part of me and not something I do when I have time to kill. Writing here or my Shorts and Twitter will all stay the way they are. Of course, I might not be able to write all the time, but that’s alright given that this isn’t a tablog. I’m looking forward to insanely faster Internet speeds, even if some things are blocked or restricted. I’m looking forward to new experiences to help take my mind off things that I repeatedly and unproductively keep thinking about day in and day out. I’m looking forward to renewed priorities, but ones that aren’t laboured. I’m looking forward to efficiency and clear feeling of purpose in things that I do.

For once, I’m looking forward to the change.

Web Application • an application that is accessed via web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet.

Till now, I’ve been somewhat neutral about web applications and the popular notion that the browser is making the operating system irrelevant. But the more efforts I see being put into web development, the direction applications are taking, the more I realise that web applications are not the future. Given whatever number of years, our workflow is not going to slowly migrate completely online. Companies like Google and Apple, with their respective web browsers, might be trying to push the web as a viable platform, but it’ll be long — too long — before they reach where they’re trying to. By then, something else will come along that will again change the field. That’s how it rolls, right?

No good reason

If I try to list out some reasons as to why one might use a web application at all, the ones highest up on the list seem to be that 1) the user gets to access his/her files from anywhere without hassles, 2) familiar UI and uniform functionality, while being easily availabile everywhere regardless of operating system (but dependent on the browser), and 3) the applications can be updated quickly, or the community can release client-side features (using extensions like GreaseKit/Greasemonkey) that fill the holes the original developers didn’t.

Access to files from anywhere is not really web application specific. It’s a simple synchronisation with the cloud, which any desktop application can do. Services like DropBox get the job done very nicely, but Apple and Microsoft have their own cloud sync solutions as well if one needs it. There might be issues with the format of files and opening them in a compatible application on a particular system, but with most document formats becoming pretty much standard (like .DOC and .PDF), that is fast becoming moot. OS X doesn’t even need Photoshop to preview .PSD files, for example.

Easy availability, familiar UI and uniform functionality are important points. It’s the reason Microsoft Office is so popular, and why the online version of Office is also going to be somewhat of a hit. It’s why Google’s online office apps are doing so well. But with the reducing form factors of today’s computers, the availability of the apps that we’re used to is becoming less of a hurdle. There’s an iPhone OS equivalent for almost all the good OS X apps, and basic versions of ones that aren’t. These native apps make use of (or at least, can, if they want to) the whole set of features in the iPhone — from multitouch to push notifications — which web apps cannot, unless Apple defines an API bridge for web apps (using Javascript) to access Cocoa Touch. I’m not aware of any such thing, or plans to develop something similar¹.

The Palm Prē uses web technologies, but to create native applications. Android uses Java, if I recall correctly. None of the big three mobile platforms have a way for web applications to offer powerful and rich experiences that outdo their native counterparts. If you can carry your computer anywhere you go, why do you need the easy accessibility of a weaker web application? It’s clear that the future is smaller and faster hand-held devices. Our desktop computers will probably become the mothership with which we sync at the end of the day, or use for tasks that need bigger screens. Portability of applications won’t be much much of an issue soon.

Quick and frequent updates are good, and community support is even better. But unless in good hands like a hardened company (which too, is no guarantee), it tells developers that they can be sloppy. They can be sloppy about security, about the UI, and about pretty much everything that developers of slower cycled desktop applications know to take seriously. That said, almost all desktop applications today come with self-update mechanisms and plug-in architectures. At least, all the open-source ones do, like Adium and Transmission. Broadband has made downloading big files a non-issue, again. All one needs to do, is click “Update” when the dialogue box pops up asking for it.

But there’s more

While those might seem like relatively minor issues and a “compromise for something better” — whatever that “something” might be — my main gripe against web applications is security. Almost every open platform is always under attack. Some are architecturally sound, so can stave them off, but others crumple quite easily. There’s a golden rule of the web that we all understand but is not said loud enough:

If you want to keep something hidden from others, don’t put it on the Internet.

That’s because anything on the Internet, is visible and accessible to somebody. In the worst case — anybody. It’s the nature of computers. Even in office LANs, nothing is secure the moment your computer is connected to the network, but you trust your office employees and the network more than you trust a random user on the Internet. So if you’re planning on using web applications to work with really sensitive documents and files, I suggest you think twice. This was one of the implications of using the cloud that Richard Stallman raised when he called it “stupidity” — of losing control. I’m not as fanatically against it as him, but I can see where he is coming from. One is in better hands when using Google Apps, but even they are known to go down every now and then.

Attempts like Google’s Chrome OS at bridging the gap between the web and the desktop are interesting. But the only reason they’re doing this is because they have vested interests in dethroning Microsoft’s monopoly over the desktop, just like the Linux zealots (who have their own issues with anarchical features, functions and compatibility of their various systems). I don’t want to comment on anything before seeing what is in store, but Chrome OS is a vapourware product in its alpha stage. Nobody has any idea of how it’s going to work, except some tid-bits of what it’s going to try to do. From whatever I’ve seen and read though, it’s not compelling. Not even a little.

I’m not spelling doom here. I am saying that web applications are just a part of the future which promises more portability, usability, openness and freedom. As I’ve said before and will continue to preach, An application that runs in an environment can not be more important than the environment itself. That’s not something which will change.

Web applications are natural extensions for desktop applications, not a substitute.

One of the last comments I got here (which was never published) was from C. Maoxian:

The problem when you dump all your links or all your thoughts into Twitter is that you flood your followers’ twitterstream and they’ll quit following you. I thought about following you, then I checked your followcost and discovered it’s “nuclear.” There’s a real balance one has to strike when using Twitter: you can’t tweet too much (or too little).

I thought about it, and decided that while I wouldn’t change my Twitter behaviour, I needed a better place to put up the short off-topics since 140 characters just wouldn’t do and a sudden burst of tweets is not feasible because 1) there is no good way to show relation between tweets, hence the context is lost from one tweet to the other unless explicitly stated. And that just eats up the limited allowance of characters, and 2) Twitter isn’t the place for an intellectual analysis, no matter how small. The nature of Twitter means that it will be lost quickly, before someone else can read and absorb what I said.

I thought of using Geekaholic itself, but that idea shot out of my head almost as soon as it came in. The design and theme of writing that I’ve built up here stops anything less than a fixed number of words from being put up. That was done on purpose. It was to force a certain quality and deliberation in whatever essay I wrote to be posted here. The lesser the text, the more the chances that it’s not that important. If it is important, I will research and find out more about it until it becomes a significant amount of text; that’s just how it should be.

So I had to find another way to go about doing this. That’s how Shorts was born. Shorts is powered by Tumblr, and it gave me the excuse for giving it a run that I’ve been wanting to for quite some time since Tumbling has become a verb on its own. I dived in with no expectations, but I liked what I saw. Being mostly about the right tool for the job, WordPress seemed overkill for something so basic and simple to me. There were other options like Posterous, but the lack of themes turned me around.

Inspiring by looks

Tumblr’s choice of themes is amazing. Nothing special or too flamboyant, they don’t jump out of the page to catch your eye. And yet, they’re pretty. They’re pretty enough to inspire words, to make me want to write. It was the first thing I noticed about other Tumblogs that I saw. The look made me want to start my own just so that what I wrote could have a look like that. Maybe it’s the differing ideologies, but I’ve not felt this in any of WordPress — .com’s — pre-built themes. I had to make one that I was comfortable writing to. But Tumblr came with so many, catering to the whole spectrum. It was just a matter of picking one and then changing the theme code a little to make it mine.

Most of the Tumblogs I have seen, have all been simple and minimal. And a good number of them have been quite interesting to read — even if not subscribing material — enough to make me stop by every now and then. I guess it’s something about putting the focus on content that brings it out in people. When you cut out the noise, it’s understood that the quality of writing will go up. The only itsy-bitsy things that I saw which would qualify for noise were Fusion Ads, but even they’re pretty enough to blend in. Now, I understand that since I was linked to these Tumblogs by weblogs I already read (and hence have some standard of quality), it was sort of a given that I’ll only see the cream of the crop. But this is quite a lot of cream.

Ironically, the one part of Tumblr that I did not like, was the part others usually don’t see, which is the Dashboard. The Dashboard, strangely, is the exact opposite of what our Tumblogs look like. It’s confusing, convoluted and needlessly complicated. There are 7 ways to write a new entry based on the type. Each one has a different interface and hence a different link to click to reach there. As with all options, it’s invariably half way through that you begin questioning your choice, and think if some other option would have been better. In that scenario, I didn’t find an easy way to switch types. That was fun. I plan to switch to the iPhone app when I get an iPhone, which should hopefully solve this problem.

And that was my only complaint, which is telling. The customisation was a breeze. Especially making Tumblr point to my own domain (which thanks to the good folks at Racked Hosting also didn’t take long). I couldn’t have asked for a smoother, quicker weblogging experience. Poetically apt given the urgency of penning down my thoughts.

Divided in thought

Shorts will not just be about what’s in my head, of course. It’s the place where I plan to write anything that’s not significant enough to warrant a 1000+ word essay, e.g. my little experiment with a new writing fluff and then the release following the successful result. Some times there are residual thoughts from what a piece I wrote here, or new but related ideas that crop up at a later date. All of those things will go there. It’s really just a log of things that cross my mind or things that I do. I’m sure other writers maintain a personal log of ideas as and when they get them, to refer to them in the future. I’m just doing it a relatively more publicly than them.

A lot of WordPress weblogs I see would fit better as Tumblogs — except for the annoying Dashboard, which remains Tumblr’s weakest offering — but I guess the familiarity and customisability of WordPress counts for something. I don’t mind giving up my ability to tinker if the overall experience is good enough, and Tumblr is more than good enough.

Consider me impressed by a new blogging platform after a long time.

But with the renovation work done around here, I brought the hammer down on mine. There were two broad reasons.

Sore Thumb

I started my linked list inspired by Daring Fireball (as I’m sure most others are), since it seemed like the best way to share links which allowed me to add a little bit of my commentary along with it. I had to change the code in WordPress’ feed generating files (since I didn’t know the plug-in way) to achieve this, deciding to relegate linked posts to a separate category and going ahead from there.

It’s all well and good for feed readers, since every item is separate from everything else anyway. The problem came when arranging it on the site itself. They felt awkward and out of context randoms between longer, more meaningful and coherent pieces. Some people wrote to me saying they got confused as to what the post was about, and it took them some time before they realised that the post was linked to some place else. While that was partly my mistake, I realised that the nature of a linked list makes it stick out like a sore thumb on a weblog. No, a linked list should be separate, because it is different in idea and purpose.

A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video — Wikipedia

One of the first changes I made when I set about redesigning, was getting rid of all the river-of-posts pages. I wanted this place to look like a book, or a magazine, with each page dealing with a different topic. I didn’t want it to feel like a tumult of ideas, but a coherent collection of thoughts. One way to do that was push focus on each piece more separately. Each piece was brought on by ideas that — maybe related to something else on the web — were involved within themselves. I wanted them to be read the same way. Linked posts did not fit in with this process, being more of a “this caught my eye” than “I sat and thought about this” kind of item.

There was no good way to show them as well. I was going to dedicate a separate area for them, but maintaining two separate areas like that sounded too cumbersome before I even got around to setting it up. I didn’t see it lasting too long.

Decentralisation, or the right tool for the job

While arrangement was one issue, the other was my new found interest in data and its correct use. Keeping my links tied within my weblog meant that others wouldn’t be able to use it in ways they would like to. And in case they missed something, the only way to search through them would be to use the searching techniques that WordPress allows (which was clearly not made to deal with this). Then come the stats on links, which were completely out of the question. Since there is no way for me to account for every possible use, I thought of delegating the job away to someplace more fitting for the task.

Delicious has been one of my favourite services right from the first day. The ways it has been used (thanks to the excellent API) have, I’m sure, gone beyond what the original idea was — a social bookmarking solution. In a way, linked lists are just a collection of bookmarks, just with a few added words to explain what the linker thinks about it. So I decided to let Delicious handle this exclusively.

I already use DeliciousSafari to store my bookmarks with Delicious, so posting wasn’t an issue. Using my Twitter bookmarking script, I began harvesting links in my Twitter stream as well. Then, all it took was just posting the link to Twitter (which gave the link a far larger scope of reaching people). Everything would be handled by cron jobs that I’d set up. This way, the links would be searchable directly through Delicious, in all its delicious glory. If I ever want to display the links here, all I need to do is pull them in using the API and show them. There’s also the added bonus of an off-site storage. Even though it increases postings to Twitter, the elegance of this solution more than makes up for it. Twitter is what we make of it, and I choose it to serve this purpose as well.

I’m not against the concept of linked lists. I think they’re very much necessary. But hosting them here is not an elegant enough solution for me. I hid all my linked posts so that they wouldn’t randomly show up when performing searches. This new design doesn’t account for them at all, and I prefer things this way. Geekaholic will remain a place where I talk about things that I want to, where I put in some thought behind what I say — instead of a “here is my 2 cents on what he said”.

Then again, I have been known to change my mind pretty often.

As with all things of ability, it greatly interests me to discern and understand how or what makes it tick. Unfortunately, most people don’t bother going deeper into it beyond the fact that they can do something. Some times it is actually hard to put it down to a formula. But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try. I’ve always considered knowledge as a person’s supreme advantage over others. No knowledge goes to waste, as they say.

Some of my personal heroes in terms of writing for the web are — in no particular order — Paul Graham, John Gruber and Jeff Atwood (even if sometimes he is a little off in his ideas). As my writing has developed over the years, I have sub-consciously tried to instil some parts of their style of writing in my own. It’s not a blatant rip-off, of course. My words, my thoughts and ideas are still my own, but I’ve taken some elements of what makes their writing appealing and applied them wherever I thought they would go well. Ultimately, no person can copy another’s ability in its entirety. Every person is unique, and hence, their ability is different.

If you’ve ever asked “Why should I write?”, I’d rather you ask “Why not?”. Writing is as much of an expression as talking, the only difference being that with writing, you’re not restricted to a known demographic. Writing allows us to bring our thoughts and ideas together in a coherent stream so that the reader might understand it. In doing so, we understand the same thoughts and ideas better, which leads to something bigger than they would have in their chaotic form in our heads. As Paul Graham once said about writing:

Further Reading — Paul Graham talks about how he writes an essay in The Age of the Essay.

Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.

While I don’t think anyone can control how they think, Paul is onto something. Consider what you think as raw material. Sharing that thought is akin to moulding it into something presentable. And since writing is a self-referential way of communicating, it helps to reinforce the idea and give it a form that is easier to understand for everyone — including you.

I’ve seen many people take up writing online and give up. I can’t get myself to figure out how that works. If someone writes about things they find interesting, and what they think about them, maybe share something new they found about it as well — how do they lose the motivation or interest to keep sharing? Reader base might be one answer — but that is a mistake a lot of people make.

Writing to people is hard. It’s like trying to be the best out of everyone in your field of interest. You can try to improve yourself bit by bit, but that’s all that you can control. Trying to be better than everyone else is not only not easy, it’s a destructive ambition simply because you cannot control how the others improve and better themselves over you. Being the best should be a by-product of improving yourself, and the same goes for writing. Writing things that people find interesting should be a by-product of improving your writing to the level that you like what you write. First priority is satisfying yourself. Once you achieve that, move on to understanding the demographic you want to cater to. As Matt Cutts said in a Wordcamp presentation about improving your website’s visibility in Google:

So if you are a cat blogger, or you like to post poems or you just like to keep up with your family, congratulations. You are happy. You have won. You don’t need me. You don’t need advice from anybody. Whatever you want to do you are doing it.

But most people want something from their blog.

Most people want something irrational from what they write. Okay, not irrational, but they have unusually high expectations right off the bat. They want to be famous, constantly quoted, and (heaven forbid) rich. When the priorities for writing are out of whack, you can’t expect to get too far.

As far as I am concerned, I believe that the only good reason to write is because you want to. That’s it. Nothing else matters. When you write for self enrichment, you research to learn more, you take care to use the right language and make sense. The text becomes a natural extension of what you’ve thought, like a log of your ideas that you can come back to later. I keep going back to my previous essays (which are many, since I’ve been writing for 4 years now) to see how my thinking has progressed, and to check if what I thought back then is still relevant and correct today. It might or might not be informative to you, the reader, but it’s a perpetual exercise is self-improvement for me.

Jeffrey Zeldman said Write when inspired; rest when tired., which was shorthand for “write when you want to write, because that’s when you will give it your best”. I try to finish whatever I am writing in one sitting (some times writing more than one piece at one go), because if I leave it to be finished at a later time, it’s almost a given that some of the initial thoughts will be lost. That is the single best step of the process of writing that anyone can give you. If you want to learn how to write, first develop the “want” to write and understand the “what” of what you want to write. The rest, will automatically follow. Trust me.

The recent drama involving Tr.im and their little tantrum brought out a lot of people wildly swinging their arms at the whole concept of URL shortening and the new Web’s dependence on these link hijacking centralised services. They are right in a way. Whenever a shortening service (regardless of popularity, as long as it is being used) goes down, it takes down a part of the web with itself. Suddenly a lot of links are useless. It’s impossible to find all these dead links and bring them back to life in some way or the other. Panayotis Vryonis had a nice analogy for it:

Emphasis mine — Ed.

URL shorteners are just lossless information compressors. Much like a zip function compresses information … No information is lost, but we need more resources to decompress and use it than in the original state.

There is one big difference between a function like zip and a URL shortener: the first one is based on an algorithm, all you need to extract the original information from a zipped file is knowing the zip algorithm. On the other hand, URL shorteners are using dictionaries: each URL shortening service is a dictionary that translates the short URL back to the original. If we don’t have access to this dictionary, the compressed information is useless.

Usually, I don’t link to anything rare — something that doesn’t have a chance of getting to linked to otherwise. But links back to me (anything related to my website) should remain active as long as the website remains active. I believe that URLs are a site’s identity, and there can only be one permalink for one thing. There might be other URLs, which point to that permalink, but everything will ultimately reach the same place. I wanted to make an individual short URL service for things related to me, which was under my control from the ground up so that if tomorrow services like Tr.im or Bit.ly go down, at least all short URLs related to me will still work. It would particularly suck to have links pointing to my site all die.

If you’re going to use short URLs, it’ll be a good idea to save the Internet with rev=”canonical”

So I set about making one. It took me about 6 hours, which involved deciding on and registering a new domain name as well. Since it was an interesting exercise, and I learnt quite a deal about how URLs really work, I thought of sharing my scripts and experiences here for someone else to benefit from them. While I’m not saying that we all should have our own custom URL shortening services, I am saying that vital things related to you should remain in reliable hands (read: yours). No-one is more reliable than yourself.

Let’s get shorty

There are many ways of making this work, and a simple search will reveal readymade scripts that you just need to put on your server and you’re good to go. They handle attempts to abuse your system as well, so they’re definitely more secure than my solution. But since this is intended only for my use, I won’t be telling you where you’ll find my shortener (and I hope you won’t guess it either). I will share my scripts though, and point out some interesting bits that I came across.

My solution is written entirely in PHP since it was the fastest way to get this done. Using some simple .htaccess rewrite rules, I handle the redirects. You can grab all the important files from the Shorty Repository¹ on GitHub. Everything is under a modified MIT license. With a few changes, you’ll be ready to go. But you should keep reading to understand why I did some things the way I did, and if you find a fix, you can let me know.

The main magic happens in shorty.php that generates the short URL for a given longer one. It also accounts for custom “vanity” URLs, in case you want one which is easier to remember. Like http://⌘am.ws/aditya points to my homepage. It also handles duplicates, in that it will return the short URL if you try to shorten one that has already been reduced. Saves the database from unnecessarily overflowing with redundant mappings.

if(!isset($_GET['url']) || trim($_GET['url']) == "")
    die('Nothing to shorten.');

$host = parse_url($_GET['url']);
if(in_array($host['host'], array("tr.im", "bit.ly", "tinyurl", "u.nu", "is.gd"))) # don't repeat yourself
    die('Nothing to shorten.');

$u = "DB_USERNAME";
$p = "DB_PASSWORD";

mysql_connect('localhost', $u, $p);
mysql_select_db('DB_NAME');

# check if URL already exists
$url_exists = mysql_query("SELECT `short` FROM `mapping` WHERE `long` LIKE '". strip_tags(urlencode($_GET['url'])) ."'");
if(mysql_num_rows($url_exists) > 0){
    $n_row = mysql_result($url_exists, 0, 'short');
} else {
    if($_GET['vanity'] == ""):
        $row = mysql_query("SELECT count(short) FROM `mapping` WHERE `short` REGEXP \"[[:digit:]]+\"");
        $rows = mysql_result($row, 0, "count(short)");
        $n_row = dechex($rows+1);
    else:
        $n_row = $_GET['vanity'];
    endif;

    $ins = "INSERT INTO `mapping` (`short`, `long`) VALUES ('$n_row', '". urlencode(preg_replace("/\/{2,}$/", "/", strip_tags($_GET['url'])))."');";
        mysql_query($ins);
}

$url = "http://SHORT_DOMAIN/$n_row";

The table schema is pretty simple. Two fields named short and long, which hold the expected data. The code is pretty straightforward as well, though there are some interesting bits:

• Line 4: I have taken into account the popular shortening services so that I don’t shorten something that has already been shortened. That way be dragons. I could have un-shortened the shortened URL and then re-shorten it, but read that sentence again and you’ll see why I didn’t.
• Line 19: For non-vanity URLs, I get the number of numeric URLs from the database by using REGEXP "[[:digit:]]+" which just matches values that are digits. This way, the progression remains the smallest, otherwise we’d be reaching 100s pretty soon. I make up for the slowness of REGEXP (which is hardly much) by using count() to just get a number, not all the rows.
• Line 26: strip_tags and urlencode should be self-explanatory, but I also do a preg_replace to remove any extra forward slashes from the end of shortened URLs, so that it doesn’t create problems when using .htaccess rules to redirect, since we use regular expressions there as well.

To make it work, just call shorty.php?vanity={vanity_word}&url={long_url}.

The result of the script is a nice short URL that is stored in the $url variable for our use. I output it in a pre-selected text box so that I can copy it straightaway². It’s pretty straightforward, because there is no click tracking or any metrics involved. I personally don’t care for that stuff, because my server logs tell me everything I need to know anyway.

I thought of using pretty syntax to shorten URLs, but the regular expression for that combined with Keywurl made it quite painful to get right. There were issues with query strings in the URL to be shortened that were being stripped by mod_rewrite and other stupidities. So I just got rid of it, and stuck to directly calling the PHP script, which is what every other service does for its API.

Putting short URLs to use

Now to the actual redirection. Here we need more than one script, since we’ll be using a short URL to point to a decryption PHP script that will redirect us to the proper place based on query strings that .htaccess will translate the short URL into. It’s less convoluted than it sounds. Although messing around with .htaccess isn’t a good idea if you’re new. Those “503 Internal Server Error”s are almost always caused by a misbehaving .htaccess. So unless you know what you’re doing, use the one I wrote — it works just fine, and is really small too:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.+)$ "?short=$1" [L]

The !-f is to make sure that I can still access files if I want to, and the RewriteBase is to avoid loops.

The PHP script does a simple check against the database to locate the destination URL, and using a 301 redirect sends the user there. It’s pretty simple really. However, if you need to track clicks and other data, this is the script you should add it to.

That’s about it. Not bad for something that looked complicated but got over pretty quick. Now I have short URLs for every essay here³, as well as my profiles on the various web services I use (like Flickr) that are too long to reference otherwise. I want to throw in a quick note about unicode characters in domain names. They don’t cost extra or anything, but if you want to use a unicode character in your domain name, your choice of TLDs will be limited. It took me quite a while to get the one I wanted, but I finally got it from iDotz.net. You might have to hunt around, but give these guys a go.

I haven’t thought up all the ways I can use this, but it’s good to know I have the option.

Download

Shorty — no guarantees, no warranties. This was a part time undertaking for my needs and purposes, so it most probably won’t fulfill yours. If you do find it useful, more power to you. Released under a modified MIT license.