TechNayak(mirror)

The impact of the internet is so profound and enriching that people want to express themselves through the various ways. Bollywood stars are also not far behind ; the latest craze being Amitabh Bachchan’s blog. Besides the fact that I am a big fan of Mr Bachchan, I think, the blog idea is wonderful. Its a gateway to connect to your fans in a completely non intrusive way. Its way better than the chain mail fan club.
  I hear that there are many other stars going blog crazy. Will scour around the place to find more, especially the ones where the ladies write

 Well this is where Amitabh blogs

I am really amazed at what flock has done to the browser experience. I have always been a flock fan and the recent additions to the browser are just great. Almost all the userful and popular online applications are integrated into the browser. If you take my case ( take a look at my flock settings in the image below), you will see that my favorites is automatically del.icio.us. I can write a blog post to any of my three wordpress blogs, or my blogger account. I can integrate flickr and upload photos from flock directly. Beats having to deal with the flickr upload page ( which is currently great, but previously was a pain). Twitter updates directly from the browser. Plus the myworld page follows my friends on facebook, twitter, flickr, blogger etc. It shows latest updates on photos from friends, blogs, comments on my blog, latest twitters by friends etc Its great!!  I can also drop images, links and other interesting media like videos, audio etc to my friends on facebook which is a great way of sharing.

  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.

I just finished trying out the Microsoft WorldWide telescope and it just simply blows your mind away. Its awesome as it takes interactive applications to a new level. The application has images from a lot of telescopes which include the likes of the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. For a person interested in astronomy, its a dream come true.  The application provides bookmarks to places worth seeing and the best part is the guided tours which does a very good job with the resources at hand.
   The software is a must use for all teachers and schools who have a really great way of explaining the wonders of deep space. The tours are a really innovative feature as its always fascinating to watch and learn than to just browse around aimlessly not knowing what you are looking at ( which is what Google Mars was like, never really got the point of looking at the surface of Mars). Anyway, for scientists, astronomers, academicians, schools , universities, the worldwide telescope is a must have.

 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

The last 20 years have been more than fruitful for Bangalore and India in general as the preferred destination for outsourcing, but the tide may soon ebb. The cost advantage that India presented to the west isn’t there anymore. True globalization of the Indian work force has meant multinational and international companies are recruiting in India, offering international salaries and providing immigration opportunities. The impact of this globalization is the increase in salaries that Indian companies have to match to find skilled labor. The increased opportunities also mean very alarmingly high attrition rate amongst tier 2 and lower companies. In business processing outsourcing and ITES sector the attrition rate is almost twice that of Software. The rise in salaries especially in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad have created high income inequalities amongst the lower and the middle class. The increased money and spending power has also raised costs of living. Its estimated that about 5000 people are entering Bangalore everyday in search of opportunities, but that’s easy math when you consider the population of India; This inflow of people have put severe infrastructure constraints in these cities. Clogged roads and sky high infrastructure costs are common in these cities. Companies are finding it hard to find breathing space in the city and the instability in the government means there is no end point to the woes faced by the IT companies.

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 is my pick of the plugins for Outlook. It manages your emails and does wonderful things. Just try it out with outlook and see the difference, I suggest people with full mailboxes to use this plugin to get organized easily. Click the link below to get Xobni

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

Yahoo India search has a new feature which is very impressive, the glue search page. Its a portal search page which displays results like a portal on the topic. I didnt see a world wide release though, but on the India page its there. Portal serach is a concept which people have been trying to work on for a long time. Ofcourse portals can only be given for relevent search results which have information sources of different types. Try it at

  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

Convergence refers to the coming together of markets, technologies or concepts to benefit out of each other. This coming together when complete diminishes the lines between these two entities and it becomes really difficult to relate to each of them independently. The wikipedia definition states :

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

Im testing the XML-RPC interface to blog sites in order to buld a plugin to post blogs really fast. If this post is published on the blog then , it means Im one step away from finishing my plugin. Yaay!!

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 a big fan of OpenId for a long time and also advice many people about the benefits of using it. What I really disliked was the fact that big names were missing from the OpenId directories. That changed as Yahoo is beta testing being an OpenId provider and the news is Great. First of all it almost triples the number of users who have OpenIds and also almost every internet user has a yahoo account (approx 30 million) , which makes the proposition a whole lot better.

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.

Most programmers know databases and its importance. Thanks to the new generation of software as a service and web services, traditional RDBMS’s are sparingly used and the number is bound to deteriorate further as enterprises adopt the Saas platform.

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.