TechNayak(mirror)

It was long due, but, finally I got my own domain riteshnayak.com and will blog there. I have installed wordpress on my server but couldn’t automatically redirect from here.

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I shall try and maintain both the blogs with common posts, but I cant promise anything with the amount of time I have left to blog.

I just finished reading a McKinsey Survey about how enterprises are investing in the recent age 2.0 concepts. It was a surprising seeing that many companies have already invested in many 2.0 ideas like collaborative apps,blogs, rss and social networks. Its definitely good news for the multitude of players in the market as this could mean alliances, collaborations, JV’s and probably even takeovers and buyouts.

Whats more interesting is that many are still planning to invest wisely in these technologies to benefit out of these technologies. There is a significant change in the way people perceive 2.0 technologies over the past couple of years. I know many folk who still consider it a fad more than a necessity. Given the background of enterprise level applications, which look more into security, scalability and other aspects more than the functionality itself, its just understandable that enterprise folk don’t take kindly to their information lurking in some third party website. The inclination towards 2.0 concepts have improved after seeing dramatic improvement in productivity and revenues of other enterprises.

Out of the survey, many even claimed to be extremely satisfied with their 2.0 investments. Stuck up old folks, its time to wake up and realize the 2.0 dream.

click on the image to enlarge.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of apps being developed as plugins for firefox. A lot of 2.0 applications also try and make browser based components to functionally help with features on the site. There was browzar which was apparently a safe browsing experience with no cookies, no auto completes and full privacy. Then there are those social networking apps that connect friends and tells them what sites you are currently viewing and vice versa. Then there is flock, my favorite browser which envelopes in itself some really cool functionality like blogging, photo previews from flickr and photobucket.

How important has the browser become in the current age? very very important. If the web permeates in the enterprise apps space and we still need to maintain the same levels of security as desktop apps do then I see a small market for individual browser vendors too. More of a packaged offering. For example, if you decide to use Google Apps for your office, Google will install those apps on probably their mini server and also package along a custom browser to be installed in your network alone that will allow secure integration with the apps. I see SOA applications like SAP and OraApps to start the trend and then other apps to follow suit. The app gets more features since the browser is custom built and it will gracefully degrade to other commercial browsers.

Its interesting , I know people in the web apps sphere would have already thought an ounce or two by now. So how do you build your own browser?

With Adobe Apollo promising to blur the line between desktop apps and web apps, this definitely is a contender in the race. Given the typographic excellence in flex based apps and all the other cool factors like animations, Apollo could give birth to the next Killer browser. Even otherwise, if you still decide to go ahead and make the good old thick client, this is what you have to do.

Pick from the list of any HTML, XHTML rendering engines , on a personal note i woudl recommend the Gecko or the KHTML rendering seeing how popular they are. Next add to it a javascript runtime, Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey is the perfect library for this. Also, with the recent addition of Flash/Flex elements in a site you would require an engine for th e same, Project Tamarin will do just fine.

I found this amazing article on Om Maliks blog which highlights some interesting and fun facts about computer storage.  I will just  give you the highlights, if you need to read the full article, click here.

• The magnetic HDD is 50 years old (#). In 1956 IBM introduced 305 RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control), which is like the great-great-great grandfather of today’s disks. It was the size of a refrigerator, and stored a total of 4.4 megabytes on 50 doubled-sided, two-foot-diameter disks. The disk had a density of 2,000 bits of data per square inch and had a purchase price of $10,000,000 per Gbyte. (#)
• Today’s laptop drives are typically 2.5 inches and are a size of a deck of cards, and can store upto 160 gigabytes - or 131 billion bits per square inch. Price is less than $1 per gigabyte. (#)
• Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT)
• In the U.S. alone, $600 million worth of external hard drives were sold in 2006, up 53% from 2005, The NPD Group, a market research firm, says. (NYT)
• External hard drive prices declined 28.4% from $197 in 2003 to $141 in 2006 and the amount of storage space on the drives doubled.(NYT)
• Per Gigabyte retail price of hard disk drive storage in 2003 was $2.04, but in 2006 it was 77 cents, according to The NPD Group.
• The recording density for data — aka capacity — has increased 60,000,000-fold in 50 years. (#)
• The amount of worldwide information is projected to grow from 161 exabytes in 2006 to 988 exabytes in 2010. An Exabyte is a million terabytes.(WWD)
• By 2010, the total amount of data will overwhelm the total amount of digital storage by a factor of nearly 2 to 1. 2007 is the year that our ability to stuff bits into the digital universe will outstrip our ability to store them.(WWD)
• Research shows that in large-scale IT installations, the annual disk replacement rates typically exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems. (#)

courtesy: GigaOM

I have been working on Business Intelligence for over a year now and have seen lots of high end tools and applications. I develop BI solutions for a Fortune 50 company using some really high end BI tools to do the analysis and reporting. Analytics and BI have become more and more streamlined and are really beginning to make a difference in organizations and have started impacting them in a big way. More and more people are taking notice of the power of intelligent reporting and have begun to invest in BI solutions. This trend is observed clearly by the sharp increase in outsourced BI work to Indian tech companies. Seems like SOA and BI are the only projects coming our way. And yes, this trend is here to stay.

All said and done, analysis of boring looking tabular reports have become passe’ , its the age of cool tools that make reports more fun. Some of my recent favorites have been Google Analytics, with its flash enabled reports and also some really neat functionality built in cleverly into deceptive looking graphics. I was also excited when i looked at Crystal’s Xcelsius and its slick new outlook. My most recent fun tool is definitely Gapminder, recently acquired by Google for its really awesome looking interface. Take a look at this report and see for yourself how reports can be fun

some screenshots :

 Intel Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit

There is an elemental difference between web applications and desktop applications, web applications are unaware of their environment. Their knowledge is confined to the boundaries of a browser. Intel intends to change this with their new TDK.
   There are some dreamy methods like getPercentRemaining() which will give you the remaining battery life on your laptop, or getProtocolRateTx() which will give you the connectivity information of the device. I like this mainly for its possibilities. Everyone knows offline applications and desktop to web applications are changing the way people deal with web apps. The modern day JS intensive applications mainly contain animations, effects. Later on, we may probably even have calculating machines or way of distributing computation to  multiple machines via the web. In those cases we will have more intensive calculations on browsers.
  With the new frameworks that are coming out, there are concepts like threading, synchronous asynchronism’s aer fast picking up. By learning more about the environment, developers could leverage multicore functionality, decide on the number of threads, number of calls, execution time, etc. The possibilities are endless.
    

Quote : Imagine if your Web 2.0 application could be aware of the platform it
is running on and its environment. It could, for example, leverage
multi-core power to provide more immersive user interfaces, postpone
certain tasks during low power situations, avoid network traffic over
low bandwidth/high latency connections, etc.

The
Intel® Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit (TDK) allows developers to
learn about the platform’s configuration, e.g. display, storage,
processor, and the platform’s context, e.g. bandwidth, connectivity,
power and location, etc. within a browser using JavaScript.

The
Intel® Web 2.0 TDK contains documentation and full source code (C++ and
JavaScript) for IE 6/7 and Firefox. The code can be incorporated
directly in your extensions or JavaScript libraries, and be
redistributed royalty free.

I have been bragging about the new Apollo platform and how web development will be affected because of these platforms. Well Apollo is a platform like the JVM which enables web developers to build applications for the desktop using web based languages like html, action scripts etc. Flex of course being a very essential part of the platform. Developers can leverage the capability of Apollo to extend web functionality to desktops. It could prove a major winner with all the startpages like netvibes, pageflakes, Google personalised home page etc gathering storm. Modern day OS’s like Vista and Panther also have widgets built into the very fabric of their desktops. Yes widgets are the future and will rule the world in the next 5 years seems like the nth time i have said it.

Alright, enough gibberish. I came across these bunch of applications that were demoed at the Adobe Engage. To take a look at what these things are capable of please take a look at these sites.

A calendar, writer , lists and more organizational stuff with the ability to work offline.

  An online Office application built entirely in flash. I hear its got excellent typography and pagination. Could be a competitor in the race to the online office automation prize.

Also dont forget to check out start page yourminis and my favorite photo editing tools fauxto and picnik.

I have been hearing a lot of questions regarding the design, use and intent of OpenId and thought, I must write about it. In the past two years or so, there have been about 100+ services that I have signed up for, to see what they have to offer and maintaining those accounts info’s are a pain. Some require alphanumeric passwords, some want numeric, some want non english words and so on. As time progresses, there will be probably 1000 services that everyone will use on a regular basis and its just unfair that you need to sign up for every new service and remember the account credentials.

OpenId is an initiative to decentralize the authentication mechanism to any website. Its easier said than done, the single sign on has been a goal of almost all the big majors, the GoogleId, YahooId and LiveId( .Net Signon) have been essential to many web workers. The difference here is that, all authentication to a Google Service gets routed through the Google Auth server. Problem - its a centralised mechanism, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t work for other service providers.

In OpenId, users identify themselves using a URI or an XRI , these URI’s are provided by websites who register themselves as OpenId providers or i-Brokers. When a user visits a site that supports OpenId, he just has to provide his OpenId URI and the site requests the URI provider to authenticate the user. Its saves the trouble of multiple signons and accounts. Since this method is decentralised, people can use any or all ids to authenticate themselves.

A lot of websites have already embraced OpenId, some of them include LiveJournal, Zooomr, Wikitravel, ma.gnolia.com, claimid.com, and Jyte. Most recent being wikipedia. OpenId authentication is by default present in Firefox3 and even Microsoft is working on OpenId2.0 for windows vista.

 update : Digg founder Kevin Rose has announced at FOWA that digg will support OpenId . Microsoft and AOL have also announced the embracing of OpenId . 

Ok, here’s one for the history books - Presidential hopeful Barrack Obama, has just launched a social networking site for his campaign 08. Its pretty strange why would somebody go through the trouble of making a social network for election purposes, but it makes sense considering the impact social networks can have on people. The concept of communities is leveraged to the utmost with almost each ethnic/cultural group of people have been listed for people keen on knowing and interacting with Obama.

People from many states, colleges, districts and minorities each have their own support group for Obama. This is a good move by Obama to gain trust in people. If not anybody, Im sure the Bay Area folks will be glad to vote for him for his sheer ingenuity in leveraging technology as a medium for campaigning. Just goes to show how much social networks will /have become a part of everything human.

This is something that I couldn’t even imagine. Such use of socionets were unheard of before this. But its a good ploy. What else could social networks be used for ??

Formatpixel is another wonderful application to join the ranks of online presentations. This space is really really hot right now with the likes of Zoho, thumbstacks , preezo etc trying to develop embeddable presentations. Even India has its own player in slideshare that works as a slide show tool to embed in myspace.

I love what formatpixel looks like, it gives your presentation a magazine like appearance and also lets you do some cool stuff like blur it out, set animations etc. Notice the cool page turn effect, don’t kwow how many people are confused as to how to turn the pages, a small indication of some sort wouldn’t hurt I suppose. There are rumors of Google Presentations coming out, but wouldn’t it be easier for them to just buy one of the above mentioned tools.  With so many people already in the race for an online presentation maker, its only before time that one will emerge a true leader or will benefit out of the network effect. The others will hope for a collaboration with some big names , probably even buyouts. In the mean time check out formatpixel.

  check out this cool demo project on formatpixel