TechNayak(mirror)

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

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.

Is it true? Is Indian IT industry surviving because of lack of Semantic Interoperability?

Incorrect Semantic Interoperability describes mismatch in the format and representation of data belonging to two parallel applications which prohibit them from interacting with each other or prohibits possible migration. Take the example of ERPs like SAP and Oracle Apps, they essentially perform the same computations and solve the same problems, but do they interoperate? No. The data representations for both these applications are bespoke, which makes it unique to one product or a line of products. It is reasonable considering the fact that market domination is obtained by developing custom formats and providing custom decoders, but there is a bigger concern. For large players, data is collated and there is usually a Business Intelligence solution in place and with different products being deployed at different centres, the additional overhead of conversion of the data is imminent. Also two separate applications cannot talk to each other though they are probably linked up sequentially, you have to bring in additional middleware for format conversion and make a common bus.

Efforts like RSS, SOAP and others have been successful only to a certain extent that the format is correct but semantics are still loose. It has to come together sometime, if not now then later, when the data is huge. And the answer is yes, the Indian IT industry survives because of such semantic interoperability. Most of the workforce is maintaining these enterprise bridges (that holds together these different applications) if not building them. A majority of the work involved in the service sector has to do with writing compatibility plugins or writing migration scripts and patch ups. If it was for SI , we wouldn’t have jobs.

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…

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…