Well this is where Amitabh blogs

I can integrate gmail or yahoo mail and send pages, links, images are email to people with just a single right click button. The web clipboard which is also a godsend is wonderful when you are puling images, links and other paraphernalia from the net for your blog. For me the flock experience is perfect as it takes browsing to a whole new level. For all firefox users, try flock, you wont be dissapointed.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

 The best part is you can connect to an actual telescope and get pre-collected images from those telescopes based on your navigation. Its virtually a real experience. Reminds me more of the iLabs project where universities gave remote control of expensive laboratory experiments to people across the world.
 Microsofts Worldwide Telescope

For a new company trying to establish a presence in Bangalore, the costs of infrastructure are extremely high and the sheer amount of companies plus the income inequality created by the increased wages will assure that only high salaries will ensure loyal employees. That’s not even guaranteed. There is a resource crunch, high infrastructure costs and productivity numbers are beginning to decline. The cost advantage is clearly lost. Indian companies are setting shop in tier cities like Tumkur, Pune etc where the infrastructure costs are significantly lower and the local talent pool is still unadulterated by the outsourcing boom. This still isn’t the solution as the reason why cities like Bangalore saw the boom was due to high concentration of engineering workforce and also the output of engineers in the southern region thanks to the 1000 odd engineering colleges in the region. The setting up of companies here will only guarantee reduced costs and not skilled labor, which means poor quality software.

This situation isn’t new, it happened at route128 and also in the valley. This was the prime reason for outsourcing and now it seems we have come full circle. Falling dollar prices, recent slowdown in the US economy and the opportunities presented by countries in South East Asia, China and Russia which are currently centers of low costs means India faces severe competition. India’s economy is riding on the success of outsourcing exports and the currency has become costlier. Outsourcing has become a victim of its own success and only time will tell what fate lies ahead for India.

I recently wrote an essay on the software bottleneck and the reasons behind some of measures to resolve the bottleneck which include outsourcing, open source etc. If you were interested in the reading material above, be sure to read the essay.

Xobni: Email organization, search, and navigation for your Outlook inbox

http://in.search.yahoo.com

try these example searches

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A8pWBjyekyJIoDUA2Qy6HAx.?p=shaurya&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Mysore&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?p=IPL&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

Technological convergence refers to a trend where some technologies having distinct functionalities evolve to technologies that overlap, i.e. multiple products come together to form one product, with the advantages of each initial component.

I recently wrote an essay on digital convergence for a course im taking. The essay talks about how telephony and computing converged to become the phenomenon we know as the internet. The essay talks in detail the history of both these fields and highlights significant landmarks and events that laid the foundation to this ocnvergence. Its an interesting read for anybody wanting to learn about the history of the internet.

Click here to download my essay on Convergence

If you have developed a web application and want users to post to their blogs using your application, this is the way to do it. Its really simple. Here’s the library I tried. Its really simple and works well for Blogger, but in Wordpress, the title of the post doesn’t appear. For wordpress, you can use the MetaWeblogAPI for XML_RPC. Just download the XML-RPC implementation in php from here and follow the instructions in this article. That should just about do it , dont you think ?

Oh and this thing took me less than 20 minutes to do

I have been trying to make a web property OpenId enabled and its a cinch. Just download and install libraries for the multitde of programming languages and then just follow some basic configuration steps , map the OpenId users to your user management system and you are done. Here is a list of all the plugins available for OpenId enabling your site.

OpenId has really come of age and with Yahoo announcing support its become a neccesity for almost every web App. I would even go so far as to mandate websites , old and new , to enable OpenId on their sites and save the users from the painful signup and confirm cycle. The sheer number of OpenId holders should be motivation enough for properties to go the OpenId way.

Data has far outgrown the domains of just text. Today we talk of mutlimedia data, urls, semantic data and many more application specific formats. Information on the Web is in JSON, REST , XML , Microformats etc. With this vareity in data formats and representations comes the inherent need for flexibility in storage and querying of such information. Almost all database users know of the conceptual modelling required for the design of any database, the key principle being that more tighter the model, more efficient the database. The integrity of the database is only as good as the integrity of the data. But you cannot talk of data integrity with the kind of formats available today.

Clearly markup data dominates the web . Though databases have developed features to better support , store and validate markup data , the initial design of databases was never to store the wide variety of loosely organized data. Querying of such markup data is fruitless and so is the attempt to index, sort , aggregate this data. To develop a custom database capable of all the above mentioned operations could be a solution, but the given the non standardized nature of this data and its probability of change, you would have a tough time scouring the web to search for changes. Plus these databases will not be semantically inter operable.

Developers are taking notice of a new scheme of storing data, I call it the bucket store. The design is roughly the same as that of a hash table, where data blocks are stored in buckets and hashes are used to index or refer to these buckets. A little improvisation in terms of adding upper layers like domains, groups and so on to complement the schema, table in a database is done to make the data easily classifiable. The advantage with this scheme is heterogeneity in data formats and the absence of constraints.

Several products are offering such services at dirt cheap prices. Take Amazon’s S3 or the recently launched Simpledb or CouchDb which offers a host it yourself version of this storage. Amazon S3 has businesses running on top of it; of the many I can recall Slideshare running on S3. With the advent of more mashups and heterogeneous data being churned out by the web more of such non DBMS related storage options will be employed. Given that this paradigm does implement all the enterprise important features like security, access control , backups, transactions etc and mature modeling methodologies that can rival the ER are proposed , I don’t see any problem in this becoming the most viable and cost effective option for data storage.

Here_Comes_Another_Bubble_-_The_Richter_Scales
Uploaded by kingofdoper

The older tracking code urchin.js will still continue to work for at least another year but there will be no feature updates or compatibility with the newer features. For me , this change means revisiting lots ( and I mean lots ) of pages where I have embedded the tracking code. Lets hope it goes smoothly.

In what can be termed as a not so wise decision, Google has decided to rid its customers the privilege of choosing where to put their ads. You will not be seeing the advertise on this site link on the served up google ads.  Was this is a good decision, is still debatable. The reason : the ads that people put up on sites do not get clicked as much as the ones that the adsense computers pick out. The numbers back up their theory.

Its still a feeling of insecurity - if you ask me. As a publisher, I would like to publish my ads on certain sites that I know will give me better ROI. This situation is very similar to the proof of the four colored theorem. How will google prove that the ads that are served though the adsense engines do really help in better marketing the publishers wares? Is there even a quantifiable measure to check the validity of those ads? Sure the numbers back up the case, but the minority could definitely have done better things in terms of sales. Not all transactions on adsense go down as ROI, its only what the publisher decides to track. If the publisher has no shopping cart or an online selling model, how will the adsense inpact be felt. All these are questions unanswered. But for now the algorithm rules supreme.

Lets see some specifics and understand what I am really talking about. You will say the first thing a web based venture needs are servers and collocation centres, WRONG!! You have EC2 for computing, or EDGE grids, S3 or other similar services for storage and even if you do require the pleasures of your own server, try one of the virtualization technologies of the web hosts. That should just about cover your hardware part of things, except if you are trying to break the record for calculating largest number of decimals found in Pi ( which stands frighteningly close to a trillion digits when I last checked).

Now comes the software part of things. Most web businesses thrive on prebuilt, read to deploy open source software. Be it blogs, wikis, forums, bug tracking tools, there is always an open source software for whatever that is that you want to do. What’s even better, is that some of these software’s are self hosted and all you need is to include some paths and you are up and running with the latest and most stable version of the software. The advantage with this scheme is that you don’t need to manually upgrade your installations; they are done by the provider.

Supposing you do require the luxury of your own server, then invest in one of the upcoming virtualization technologies provided by many top hosts. They give you shell access and the comforts of your own server complete with install privileges and best of all, you don’t maintain it.

So since the hardware and software parts of the company are done, all you have to do is think of an innovative idea and get the ball rolling.

Incorrect Semantic Interoperability describes mismatch in the format and representation of data belonging to two parallel applications which prohibit them from interacting with each other or prohibits possible migration. Take the example of ERPs like SAP and Oracle Apps, they essentially perform the same computations and solve the same problems, but do they interoperate? No. The data representations for both these applications are bespoke, which makes it unique to one product or a line of products. It is reasonable considering the fact that market domination is obtained by developing custom formats and providing custom decoders, but there is a bigger concern. For large players, data is collated and there is usually a Business Intelligence solution in place and with different products being deployed at different centres, the additional overhead of conversion of the data is imminent. Also two separate applications cannot talk to each other though they are probably linked up sequentially, you have to bring in additional middleware for format conversion and make a common bus.

Efforts like RSS, SOAP and others have been successful only to a certain extent that the format is correct but semantics are still loose. It has to come together sometime, if not now then later, when the data is huge. And the answer is yes, the Indian IT industry survives because of such semantic interoperability. Most of the workforce is maintaining these enterprise bridges (that holds together these different applications) if not building them. A majority of the work involved in the service sector has to do with writing compatibility plugins or writing migration scripts and patch ups. If it was for SI , we wouldn’t have jobs.

There are a set of people that like the innovation happening on the web front and are adopting 2.0 technologies like there is no tomorrow. Everything from office automation to project management is now managed online on productivity service providers.  Concepts like wiki, blogs, forums etc are fast appearing as mainstream applications in organizations. Surely as technology evolves and takes new shape, we will see a dramatic shift in adoption of these new tools .

In contrast , there are the other people who have been around for a long time and have seen a lot of productivity applications. To these people, technology is nothing more than a fast changing fad and prefer to stick to their old time favorites. Take people who have seen the main frame era, such folk just don’t appreciate concepts like distributed computing, virtual servers etc. Quotes like ” our mainframes never needed mirroring”, are common. People who still live reminiscing innovation of their times like spreadsheets and ERP’s.

It may be hard to believe but these form the majority of the so called power users of organizations and these legacy softwares( pun intended) , are maintained and supported just for their usage. Its distrubing to know that enterprise software lags open source software by at least 3 years , in terms of innovation. This lag can clearly be accounted to the legacy lovers who insist on using their accustomed softwares. Where does product development go in such a case. Office 2007 is seeing very slow adoption due to a change in the usability. Will this set of users be responsible for the sluggishness of product development? who will convince these users to adopt newer software? more importantly how? What will these users demand 20 years from now?

Its a strange question, but yes its an emerging market.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. First , there is YSlow, a plugin which works along with firebug and tells you why a website is slow based on certain pre defined parameters. How about an entire section of a site dedicated to performance. Blogs, presentations, talks, podcasts, videos on performance and its related fields. Do you want to know the thirteen rules to speed up your website, then do read this. You are likely to find one of the reasons in this showing up in YSlow.

Also feel free to join the exceptional performance group to discuss more on high performance websites.

People are moving to more open source technologies and are beginning to discard enterprise software. Take for example a migration in my company, people moved from Weblogic to Tomcat, Oracle to MySql and other host of open source technologies. Problem – open source software isn’t usually made with a lot of scalability in mind, unlike enterprise software that is meant to be scaled. So , when this bunch of non scalable software sits on an enterprise bus, you need performance to match if not better the enterprise counterpart. This is where performance tuning comes into play and as more and more open source finds ground in the enterprise, more such challenges with regards to performance have to be addressed.

DataQuest IT companies rating 2007

Google is going to put a cookie in your browser that will record information everytime you read an ad served by Google. The cookie helps Google predict what kinds of ads the person clicks on and will probably help serve better and more relevant ads. Up until now the ads are served based on the content of the site and also the publisher’s preference on the ads. The  cookie also doubles up as a proof of click ( think click fraud) and more material for publishers to analyse the hits to their ads and mine for patterns. Though the purpose is for ads, Im happy its a step ahead in personalization. The cookie acts like a distributed store of personal information that can be mined by ad servers and then acted upon.

The possibilities of this technology could be endless. Based on my previous post, where I wrote about a distributed implementation of a personalization database which all applications can use to customize data better, google’s cookie is one step towards such a solution. If every browser had cookies of personalized information then applications ( aka good applications) can mine these cookies and get useful information about the persons Net habits and preferences. But a cookie has size restriction and cannot probably be used to store the abundance of personalization information. You can use a add on activex plugin or a firefox addon like google gears with underlying SQLite database and do wonders with it. Of course this would mean about two years of thinking of standards and more bureaucratic gibberish, but once done, it will be a truly distributed system and the web, partially personalized.

You could be served the right category of blogs on wordpress, get the right videos on the opening page of you tube, see the relevant news on CNN , see the most relevant feeds on your RSS reader and much more. Personalization ahoy !!