TechNayak(mirror)

I got your attention didn’t I ? Now read on.

The problem with open source software is its lack of quality. And how is this lack of quality downgraded even more ? its due to the lack of proper documentation and support. Its pitiable looking at the so called open source enthusiasts who advocate open source like they live and breathe it, but when it comes time to get the basics of software engineering in place, you see them stepping back from the limelight. The problem can be attributed to the fact that institutes teach programming but doesn’t teach quality standards. Its gives you a very good idea why there are probably 300 projects that do the exact same thing on sourceforge and its so because the people who actually want to use one software don’t get enough help, documentation on it.

  Have you ever tried looking at code that you wrote a year ago ? I have code that I wrote sometime in 2003 and trust me , I cannot understand a line in it. Why ? you cannot remember ever function that you wrote in life. Is it so hard to understand? Im sure most of you guys have taken classes in software engineering, its impossible to have a good software system without support and documentation. I shall take the example of a project that I am planning release soon.

 Thanks to about a dozen people who contributed to the code, there is a lot of redundant code and almost half of the code, is not being used. What do we do now ? do we release it in the shape that it is ?  Im sure the download size will probably double. Also, a lot of segments of code are not documented. How will it look when people see their names flashing at the top of a code file next to the @Author with lines and lines of spaghetti code with no documentation or explanation of their intent.

 Even with the valiant attempts by a professor, our testing strategy has largely been designed not to test, but to con people into thinking its a testing strategy. Is it that hard to test ? No , it isn’t ; its just uncool work. Our project also contains a multitude of technologies like jsp’s , java, javascript and there is absolutely no architecture diagram or a data / control flow diagram. Most of the JSP’s and Javascript is still undocumented let alone being tested.

 The last bit is that usage. Its not as simple as gcc project -> ./a.out . There are a lot of things that need to be configured and specific data formats, size restrictions and tons of other configuration information that needs to go into the system. But there isn’t a single document or a written account of how to go about setting up this project and executing it. Im sure even Donald Knuth wont be able to properly configure and run our project (No offense to Knuth, just used him as a figurehead) . Who will do the job of documenting it so that people who will actually want to use the project, get the documentation that they require ?

 Its strange, the same people that commend Apache projects for their wonderful documentation and support forums do not put in a similar effort for their projects. I am not even talking about the technically inept people, I am talking about people who can do technology well. If the future patriarch’s of technology do not follow the basics of getting a project right then how can the next generation of programmers survive with such unkempt software. If you cannot contribute to making open source better, then please stop advocating it. Its better naive people pay for software which gives them support and service.

In our effort to program the cool, we have forgotten the basics of engineering. Its a shame they call us engineers !!

Tags: Opensource, software engineering, documentation, testing

Remember early 2004 and the release of Gmail ? The “ooh so exclusive, invite only” mailbox that was so cool. I remember. How hard I tried to get an invite, how I rejoiced when I layed my eyes on it; How I tried to figure out why is the page not navigating or how is that my contacts are autofilling the to field but I cannot find them in the source. How, almost after 4 whole months of searching, I learnt the buzzword that would graduate me from mere novice to a professional in the web space. AJAX.

After that started the GCraze. Almost any entity that had a G before it was sought out to be the most watched property on the web. This craze still holds; the only difference is that the craze has moved from web developers to general public. Most G properties are running only because of the G in front, sort of like the Y! of the late 90s. Call it fate or just too much popularity, I think a lot of people are coming the full circle.

Over the recent few days I have seen a lot of discontent among all the G users. I shall list most of the ones I remember, but you will get the idea..

- Mail : probably the most sought after mail service in the recent past has its own share of problems. The first being slow connections. You must see Gmail running at our university, when 250 people share a 16Mbps connection, Gmail takes on a life of its own. Mails dont open, conversations are not updated and the chat feature is a pure disaster. The biggest problem I have with Gmail are the intrusive ads next to my mails.
- Orkut and Google Talk: Orkut was the social network for India, so claim many people. But if it wasn’t for the G tag, I would have liked to see how far Orkut would have gone. I know this having competed with Orkut for a year with my social networking venture samparkh. The problem with social networks with no personal value add to it ( unlike del.icio.us or flickr)  is that, it tends to grow boring, and spam and other marketing material get the better of the network . You have no choice but to opt out. I consider Gtalk as a piece of art , a wonderful piece of software who got the design and the user experience part just right. But Orkut integration did one very awful thing, it increased my contacts on Gtalk from a mere 10 to about 200, which I really didnt want. Some say I missed a warning to the same, but now there is no undoing it. Lot of my friends are shifting back to Ymsgr and Windows messenger because they see more peaceful days there.

So thanks to these problems and more, there is a reverse migration to older properties who over time have become better and people are rediscovering their long lost loved ones. Google is doing all the right things with other properties though. I love the reader and just cant do without it and thanks to the sharing and the friends aspect of it, its almost like a new paradigm of use of RSS. Docs also is really cool, though I still like using Zoho, coz its home made and is just purely awesome. Thats about it I guess.

ps : Inspiration for this post comes from my valiant struggle for almost 2 whole hours to get Gmail to work only to see a “Your Account is experiencing Errors” or something. And then I try Yahoo Mail and its so wonderfully fast and awesome and guess what, hotmail works like a charm too.

update: My Jinx continues. I have the Gods pissed. I decide to look at my shared items page and I see my own blogpost has gone missing wtf

Tags: google, gmail, google talk, gtalk, orkut

So, I downloaded the latest installment of Firefox and tried it out. A brief about me, I have been a firefox user for a long time now and usually wait for newer versions of the browser to be shipped. The addons feature when launched was truly the best concept ever, then came the integrated search bar, spell check and a host of other wonderful features. I admit, I use firefox purely for its addons and nothing else (Actually the other reason is that my primitive designs really look good on firefox , IE and me dont really get along on the design playfield )
  Well the 3rd installment really didn’t get me excited. Except for the full text like search on the address bar, I really didnt see any difference. The so called great features of FF3 viz offline support and apis for the same, social features etc are completely missing. So there is faster javascript and stuff, but for people in the third world countries ( at least in terms of bandwidth) like ours, pages take an eternity to load and a slight improvement in JS doesnt really do much until underlying infrastructure is changed.
  The 3rd installment of FF has let me down. I still recommend people to use Flock. Their features and extensions on firefox are really great and do wonders for web users.

The World Environment day has again highlighted the energy crisis the world is facing and its almost certain that the next biggest market is energy. Technology for efficient consumption of energy, be it electrical or fuel driven, will be at the peak of global demand. Many companies are getting into the energy space in the hopes of cashing in on this phenomenon. Though we may not live to see the true implications of the energy crisis, its almost guaranteed that future generations will find it really hard to survive the energy crisis. There are some things that we as individuals can do to help preserve the environment – here are a few that are not all that hard to follow
 

•  Follow yearly maintenance schedules to ensure that your furnace and air conditioner run efficiently.
• Unplug rarely used appliances such as a TV located in the spare bedroom.
• Dry your clothes on a laundry line instead of using a clothes dryer
• Replace all incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFL). CFL’s last up to 10 to 15 times longer and are 75 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
• Turn off lights when leaving a room.
• Switch off your monitor or close the lid of your laptop when not in use. Remember always to shut down the PC before going home from Office.
• Set up your monitor to go to sleep when idle for more than 10 minutes.
• Reduce the brightness in your monitor.
  
• Do not unnecessarily leave electrical items like your phone, camera on continuous charging.
• Ventilate your room and use fans and Air conditioners sparingly.
• Always check the emission of your vehicle, remember to tune your engine optimallyto cut emission levels.
  
• Share a carpool or drive with a friend to work or college.
  
• Don’t waste paper, use a computer wherever necessary.
  

I also found out that I emit 3.056 Tonnes of Carbon dioxide every year   This is my environment day post

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.

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