TechNayak(mirror)

Gone are the days of the digital divide, there is a new kind of divide amongst many computer professionals now. Its the generation gap. Its hard to comprehend this statement, but anybody, whose is exposed to at least 5 years of industry dynamics, will know exactly what I am talking about. Call it Moore’s law affecting software or just plain old generation gap, there is a clear demarcation between people who appreciate new concepts and those who prefer things the 90s way.

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.

Recently, the field of performance has been taken by storm. Right from the people in my company who came to improve performance of our websites to the people who gave talks about performance in unconferences held in the city, performance seems to be the thing to talk about.

A recent trip to the Yahoo Developer network portal also showed some glaringly visible tributes to the field of performance. Continue reading Performance and its importance for websites…

Found this pdf via Dataquest. Don’t really know if I can really post this, but what the hell, who am I killing ?

DataQuest IT companies rating 2007

I wrote about personalization some time back and about how we should actually be approaching this problem. Google has got their act into place and are making your own light weight personalization meter, but its for ads

Google is going to put a cookie in your browser that will record information everytime you read an ad served by Google. Continue reading Personalization is one cookie away…

There was an interesting concept put forward to me by my professor - Open World Computing. A software that is not bound by any restrictions or constraints. A software that learns and adapts to its environment. Think of a person who is taken from a metro and put in a village. Does the person fail and give up like a computer program ? No. the adaptability of living beings is something so hard to understand that it can take probably another 1000 years to just simulate a living being, let alone learn its qualities.

Think of the same thing in software. A software that is programmed based on generic constraints and the software dynamically learns from its environment through input devices like sensors and then adapts to the changed environment. The classical shortest path problem can be taken as an example. If a crawler running through the shortest path is lifted from its path and put somewhere else, will it be ale to comprehend the change and then quickly adapt or will it be lost. What if the graph changes and produces a lot of cycles or what if the problem statement changes during the course of the program.

I know that a very few people are relating to what they are reading, but the belief that a machine can learn and adapt is what scientists are trying to prove everyday. Machine learning is taboo after movies like iRobot and Terminator, but trust me, we are far far away from something like that. If we can solve a subset of problems of adaptability through an expert system, that will be an achievement in itself.

But how do you go about designing software with such requirements. I would go one step ahead and call it no requirements or changing requirements with no defined thresholds. No current methodologies like OO or aspects can cater to such a requirement. Probably a new scheme of designing learning software has to be developed. Taking tips from AI and the Turing thesis, a perfect turing machine is what is required. Its a hard call but we will get there one day.

There are a lot of schools of thought when it comes to the comet paradigm. There are some who think of comet as a technology in itself that can change the way the web works, while others think its nothing more than another buzzword alongside Ajax and Web2.0. I think, in essence , the latter is more appropriate.

Comet is essentially an design principle which aims at achieving true push technology using http. Comet is not a technology in itself, cometd is an implementation effort to make such a paradigm possible, but comet itself isnt a technology. For real time systems and other applications like stock tickers you don’t need an entire page refresh, its enough if you can get the updated values in your respective places. Ajax seemed to be the answer for sometime with browsers asynchronously requesting for changes and then updating the same in DOM. The problem with Ajax was the polling, since the job was asynchronous, there was a interative pattern of asynchronous requests and replies. Continue reading Comet paradigm implementation…