TechNayak(mirror)

Well Google Mini has been around for two years now and its official. Google mini is hardware with built in firmware that acts like a mini google server in your own enterprise. Picture this, you own a job consultancy firm with over 30 employees and each of these employees have reumes of hundreds on candidates in their own machines. To find a person with certain skill sets, you have to manually search all these machines or probably maintain a control area of all resumes and search there, probably even invest in some sort of a resume management software. Even if you do go on to implement one of these above solutions, how much will it scale? will it still handle the load when your company has over 500 employees? Now consider a company with 20,000 employees and their individual documents, presentations , pdfs, spreadsheets etc. Managing and searching data and information in enterprises is complicated. Well, thats where the mini comes in.

You buy the mini, give it power and also a LAN connection and voila, you have a dedicated server which crawls the entire network in your enterprise and indexes information. A built in server powers a web based Google Enterprise Search site and you can google your documents like its in your own machine. The concept is definitely astounding as are the possibilities. No need of manually maintaining documents or the pains of version control or shared area space, a dedicated server does all this and more. IF you are an enterprise that wants to invest in a search solution for yoru network, look no beyond the Google Mini, its a cinch.

Had been really busy for sometime. My current project was up for release and we did a pretty good job of it in the timespan that we allocated for ourselves. Read all about it here.  It was a sleepless, nerve wrecking experience seeing all our code failing on production. But we( as in the developers) are all happy with the end product. Thats what finally matters I guess, Well back to blogs now….

First it was Organisational Charts and now its relatives. I just love what Geni has to offer. Its a method of cataloguing and making family trees and the concept just rocks. Just add your name , your fathers name and mother’s name and your email id.  After this you just add your relatives and their email ids. They inturn get invited to geni to build their own tree. As the process continues the tree grows and keeps adding branches , you can navigate your entire family to see their profiles and information.

This service offers a unique service that everybody will love to use. I see great potential in this service and as the network picks ups  users and the trees get bigger , you can have a really big netowrk of related people. Will take time though. The networks are private and you can only view your own network, which is a great initiative to maintain privacy.

Interesting article I came across in Sadagopans blog, about software expenditure. Google’s GM for enterprise applications says that almost 75 to 80% of software expenditure by CIO’s are used up in maintaining the systems that they have. Enterprise products sell at high costs, the money usually is for customising existing SOA’s to fit business models, probably migration from other mainstream products and last but not the least maintainence and service.

Products cannot be foolproof but users can, that is the motto that maintainence projects live by. There is no doubt that products are sturdy and well tested, but the lack of technical know how amongst the people who use these products or technologies always leads so called assumptions. Take for example searching for and inventory, an employee figures out if he can do a search on one of the screens then he sees information, the same is passed as knowledge to the other people in the team. Problem, the screen was never meant for that, no this creates new holes and inadequacies in the product. The result, incosistent data , unstable system state and yes since these from base systems for MI applications, all reports will have perculated wrong values. In an enterprise software chain, where one product feeds of another and so on, the affected modules could be plenty, and lot of rework would be required to get the system back to its inital state. This where the maintainence team cashes in, coming in as disaster recovery experts , they set right almost every issue raised by the enterprise. This ofcourse, comes at a really big price.

So how do we control such expenses and leaks? Well one solution would definitely be to train employees and possible people who affect the system is susceptible to such errors. But it doesn’t end there. Products themselves should build auto correction mechanisms and sense incosistencies based on data patterns, for example you cannot sell 5 inventory when you have 2 left, if so, then something is wrong and you invalidate the transaction or correct the mistake automatically.

One of the most important factors is the failure to communicate the vision or future plans. Typically software is developed or customised based on Business needs, the products should be designed with change as an essential component and the most important point is to communicate to them the proposed visons, by doing so you give the software vendoer food for thought and they will try and make the system easy to accept the predicted change.

Hope all this didn’t fly over people heads…….

Google groups just announced that its out of beta and completely revamped. The experimental groups concept was started almost two years back and has finally come of age. It packs with it some amazing new features and usability tricks.

The immediate distinction is the slick new UI that is introduced, which has customisable colors and image. Discussions also has taken a prominent role with a new GMail like interface. Like getting all rss feeds for a comment, you can choose to get updates to a discussion by mail, a concept introduced in mailing lists like Mailman. You can even reply back by mail.

There is a new feature called pages that are incorporated, like the pages on blogs. Whats interesting is the angle that is given on those pages, claiming to help building knowledge bases . Great take I feel , will definetely turn some corporate heads. There is also a file sharing for small files. I don’t follow this, from the looks of it, Google has clearly tried to make a wiki out of groups, this is suprising because it comes after the acquisition of Jotspot which is targeted towards such a cause. Is this again inter company strategy lag or just something that will turn out for the good in course of time , is yet to be seen. Like Yahoo , Google also has competeing products in house, JotSpot against Groups ( Giki) .

Here are some screenshots.

You have to agree that the world is going ga ga over maps and companies are going all out to set new standards in this domain. Just  a look at flashearth will show you the competition in the maps domain and as usual the biggies are clamouring for attention and also popularity.

Setting new standards this time around is Google, who is going to photograph the city of Syndney, Austratlia on the 26th of January, Australia Day. The company is encouraging people to wear something distinctive, hold up a sign (face-up), draw in the sand, or even arrange themselves into a ‘fun formation,’ reports the Sydney Herald. Google apparently has got permission to fly a Low flying Aircarft really low for this feat, almost 600 metres and most of the people will be distinguishingly visible at such distance and resolution.

This is the first time Google will try anything on this scale, according to the SMA’s report: Lars Rasmussen, head of engineering for Google Australia and one of the lead engineers for Google Maps, “said the images will add a ‘few more zoom levels’ to the local maps and be between three to four times more detailed than are currently available for Australian terrain on Google Maps.” - InfoWorld

With reference to the mail that I received last week, Zoho, the awesome office suite that I have ranted about almost half a dozen times, is partnering with Omnidrive to offer storage for all Zoho documents. The Zoho API is ofcourse the reason for such an offering , as and when the online office space will be adopted, there will be more and more organisations adopting the online version. With the recent outages and security risks that Google has had with their notebooks and mail,  companies like Zoho will stand out as an autonomous service which offers the same set of features without the hassles.

The new partnership will allow people to store their online documents directly onto Omnidrive and the vice versa, ie all Documents on Omnidrive will directly open in Zoho. Online Office products should strive to be more collaborative( need of the hour) and this step only puts Zoho in a bigger league by letting people have a centralised storage and collaboration for all their documents.

This is for all you 2.0 and Ajax enthusiasts out there. Alex Hopman who created the XMLHttp object back in Microsoft details about its history, its conception, how it found use in outlook and also soem lessons learnt while developing it.

If you call yourself a 2.0 proponent, you just have to read this. Read the article here.

After a long time, IBM seems to have given new lease to their once flagship product Lotus. Lotus is being reinvented with newe web 2.0 features, wikis and more collaborative options. Social software for business is the new buzzword around town and IBM is ths driving this thought forward.  This now adds another threat the Online Office Suite market. IBM has been known to deliver amazing value to the products that they sell and Im sure when you release Lotusphere 2007 . The Lotus notes and Domino products are being redeployed at a crucial time in the market. With the ever expected Office 2007, the live suite , Google Office and third party tools like Zoho, the Online office space is getting extremely crowded. But unlike other markets, there is tremendous growth with no clear winner. Its understood that the some will win over others over sheer ease of use and brilliance of the product, where as the others will use their already existing brand image to push their own might. Its definitely going to be an interesting year for the Office space.

You can read more about it on the domino Blog

I just cannot live without firebug nowadays, its become more a default than an added utility and I have done my part of suggesting it to atleast a 100 people I know. I found this article by Joe Hewitt through Ajaxian, which details out what you can do with Firebug.

I shall make a small list of the things described.

- Exploring objects : all the DOM and the XHR’s are always been kept track of even after the page has finished loading so you can explore a wealth of those nitty gritty things that used to drive you up the wall before.

- Mouse over structure highlighting - moving your mouse over a html element wil highlight the element on the page. Great utility when you are thinking of things like HTML debugging or even DOM placements.

- Edit with ease- you can edit almost anything in Firebug and can view changes in place than having to run back to your Editor to do so.

- XHR is the best : all XHR request URLs and their replies and content are sniffed out. Debugging these things were a pain in the behind, when I started ajax development. Wish i had Firebug that time.

- Logging : Firebug is not just a way for you to examine a page from the outside; it is also a place for you to send messages from within the page itself. To facilitate this, Firebug provides every web page loaded in Firefox with the console object that contains a number of functions for logging. As your script executes, you can fill the console with an ongoing stream of data for you to analyze.

- Addign breakpoints : You can add breakpoints in Firebug to your script and break on to check individual values and variables at each state. This has got to be one of the most amazing  features of firebug. You can also select an option , break on error, to stop further execution the page when a error occurs.

All in all firebug is a tool which any webdeveloper should know of. If you havent already got, then please do so.