QWERTY

SUN

2009-02-03T21:45:00.001-05:00

SUN is a great company when it comes to technological innovation but has failed to convert it into profits. Most of the people seem to blame their sales and marketing folks. I have seen this first hand in my domain also that for some reason they are unable to sell their products to non-technical folks even though their product is technically better than some of their competitor.
My thought is that they need to be acquired. I think there are two options

A technology company with strong sales and marketing that have complementary set of technologies and wants to provide top-to-bottom technology stack. A company like CISCO comes to mind.
A hosted solution company developing solution platform (currently called cloud platform) which can leaverage the deep hardware and software know how embedded in the firm to develop solutions on the specific stack.

Or hopefully SUN will be able to build a better sales and marketing team AND product designers rather than product engineers.

Jumpstart

2008-12-02T21:19:00.001-05:00

How do you jumpstart a blog that has been dead for almost 3 years. But there are times in life when you need to just shrug off and start doing what you want to without thinking for an explanation of past. In that sense, I think, India stands at the same juncture at this time.

Beyond the sadness, anger and frustration I have felt as an ex-mumbaikar (it being one of my favorite cities), Indian and human; it has been painful to see some of my close relatives feeling threatened for themselves and their kids lives.

At this point terrorists have explored various methods to terrorize Indians. They started with large bombs that created significant stir but not enough terror. This was probably because these were few and far in between due to amount of logistics and money involved. They then tried to attack the metropolitan cities with such big bangs but due to the nature of attacks it affected the class of people that did not have the luxury to feel terrified. In past one to two years, there has been significant attempt to develop the strategy of using small low intensity attacks in crowded areas of tier I and II cities. But I think beyond the simple element of surprise, increase in civil vigilance resulting from such an attack could make carrying out such attack significantly tougher going forward. This time (Nov 26th, 2008), it seems, there was an attempt to attack the strata of society that has felt somewhat safer so far. Even though attack tried to cover the entire cross-section of the society in Mumbai, due to the way it played out, coverage in media has become somewhat limited to the various hotels that were under seige.

Some of this reminds me of the way things took to worst in 80s between separatists in Punjab and India. The capital of New Delhi was converted into a big battleground with small intensity blasts in public places. I still remember public service ads telling people to stay away from unclaimed/stray goods. This whole thing reached a turning point when the PM Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own security guards. This incident put the Indian govt on offensive like never before and resulted in significant clampdown on the separatists.

I sincerely hope that our government and we as citizens treat the Mumbai attack at that level and make a significant attempt to raise the bar before the next set of attacks. I am sure in next few days the media will be filled with concerned people who would be sharing thoughts and ideas on how to make things better. But the real challenge, as always, will be to go to next level and attempt to continue to convert the thoughts and ideas into actions. In that sense, this act of terrorism seems to have happened at a time when the govt is under significant pressure due to the elections. In addition to that, there seems to have been an attempt by the influential people (with the help from media) in various verticals to push for reforms at various levels to ensure that such a thing does not happen going forward.

Only the time will tell whether this day would be just another day in the the list of days on which terrorists won or a day on which India resolved to never let others take the Indian concept of "chalta hai" attitude for granted.

x86 Virtualization: Keep moving

2006-01-10T10:16:00.000-05:00

The virtualization process on the x86 platform has really taken off in the market. The best part is that this process has taken place in both directions.
The hardware virtualization process has been moving at a fast pace (especially in development environment, production environment seems to be a different story or may be I do not know the story) with availability of both vendor products like VMWare ESX, Microsoft Virtual Server and opensource products like Xen 3.0 (on Intel IVT and AMD's Pacifica chips - still looking for a big yes from the community on whether it works). I guess when something like this becomes an important part of the development environment for a small company like mine, I think it really has moved far along.
At the same time, the virtualization has been developing from top to bottom starting with language (like Java and .NET). This means that at the moment we have two virtualization environment i.e. at the top and at the bottom with Operating System in the middle.
Isn't it time to start the virtualization process for the OS itself? The product like Azul seems to have taken some steps toward that but being language dependent and properitory designs, they do not fit the bill of OS virtualization. Is this time to really start thinking about completely moving away from the monolithic kernels like Microsoft Windows and Linux and start adopting the Micro-kernel architecture (or that version of existing OS) so that people can pick and choose the components to build the environment such that if you are running servers, you can remove all the User Interface components from the operating system without the need of recompiling the kernel of the Operating System. This way you can pick and choose the components that you need to build the OS environment and hence different components for each of the part of the OS so that systems can leaverage built-in features of chips to make a smaller memory and storage footprint and more efficient systems.

Protegrity: Database Encryption

2005-12-01T07:35:00.000-05:00

Need to get more information about what is really going on and how this technology can help in data privacy initiatives.

Application Dependency Scanner

2005-12-01T07:32:00.000-05:00

May be worth something to look at for basic applications. But, my basic problem still remaind dynamic dependencies added due to configurable class names, etc. So it probably may not help. Another thing to look at!!

A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age

2005-11-30T16:00:00.000-05:00

Lessons

Some of the readers know more about the subject, so allow them to contribute
Others know less about the subject or may have personal agenda. Let "community" handle them via "moderating system" (I think editors also must play a big role in the moderation till the community is not big enough to be self-regulating)
Malicious, obscene content should not be reason for not opening up to readers. Let moderation or editor take care.
reader vs advertiser - well if reader make the medium trustworthy, in long run you will have more revenue. besides that allow advertisers to reply to the things.
Go "Local" and advertise local
Think internet as mainstream medium to grow since all others are being reduced.

Java XML Tech

2005-11-17T19:57:00.000-05:00

JDOM
- http://www.jdom.org/

DOM4J
(Better) - http://www.dom4j.org/

STAX
- http://dev2dev.bea.com/xml/stax.html

JAXB
- http://java.sun.com/webservices/jaxb/
- https://jaxb.dev.java.net/

Castor
- http://www.castor.org/ XStream
- http://xstream.codehaus.org/ Jaxen
- http://jaxen.org/
Nux
- http://dsd.lbl.gov

James Strachan: Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?

2005-11-17T19:36:00.000-05:00

Good Discussion!! The major points seems to be

When Client needs to receive remote events (obviously not by polling since that adds burden on server)
A very complex "windowing" GUI with a lot of local event generation, validation, etc which can be too much for javascript which is an interpreted (thus slower) language. - My interpretation
If the processing rely too much on the business state/session which contains sensitive data (hence needs to be stored some where safe) and in world of SOA there is no place to save them!! - My interpretation
Too much pain w.r.t. browser incompatibility and immature frameworks and tool support
In-house applications do not need them since the customer is on uniform platform.
Debuggin Javascript on browser is terrible - But faster since no compile step and also firefox has good tools(I think)
- JSEclipse - Not good Enough

Cisco Moves Linksys into Small Business Market

2005-11-14T17:09:00.000-05:00

Wow!! $62 per user! that seems way too high. What's with these service companies and their love with "per user" price. Why can't they service on "per channel" or "per connection" basis along with very basic fees for maintainance. This would make much sense for those companies that would like to give service access to all their employees but all their employees would not be using the system at the same time.
This model basically seems applicable to all the network based service where all the people would not be accessing the service all the time.

Trails: .8 Released

2005-11-11T07:51:00.000-05:00

I am not sure whether this is better than the earlier products that I looked at.

The Evolving CIO's Technologies

2005-11-04T11:19:00.000-05:00

"SOA" - anyhow, anywhere, anytime
Document Management
BPM/Workflow
Virtualization of OS, Storage & VPN, Wireless Network
Application streaming(??)
Opensource desktop
Grid

AJAX Framework Comparision

2005-11-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

Good Selection!! Need to revisit

WSSE 3.0

2005-11-03T08:01:00.000-05:00

WSSE implements WS-* which is standard for interoperability. Digital signature, Authentication/User Token, WSE 3.0 does -
Security easier, integration with WCF,
---------||------||--------> Client Server <--------||------||--------- 6 Turnkey scenarios scenarios 1.

        send encrypted message 
        send encrypted large key
      ---------||------||-------->
Client                                    Server
(Public Certificate)                       (private key)
large key                                    
      <--------||------||---------
         send user/password encrypted with large key

Use policy file to get it done
WCF - Shipped with Vista. WSSE 3.0 wire level interoperability with WCF.

-----------------------------------------
|Secure|Reliable (new)| Tx      |             |
-------------------------------
|Soap  (Message)                   |   WSDL   |
------------------------------------------
| XML/XSD (data)                                  |
------------------------------------------
| http    (transport)   | TCP |Custom(UDP) |
------------------------------------------

With 3.0, the ASMX besides the basic services can be hosted as a service along with websire

Bob Lee: Generating sequence diagrams with aspects

2005-11-03T00:07:00.000-05:00

Indead a very good use of the concept of aspecting. I have not been able to understand the use of aspecting in the development and product code. Even the much touted logging usage does not make sense since it does not capture the business event for which you have to write specific event information through logging API directly.
But it seems the Aspect has found a good use in the debugging and understanding the applications' features.

OctetString Engineer Says ‘Caching is Evil’

2005-11-02T17:34:00.000-05:00

Ran into this comment which took me to above article. Besides the basic marketing stuff, the thought/comment did go into the core issue of why cache.
The idea of cache and cache management arises from the basic tussle between performance and data freshness. If you need better performance you will go with cache (well designed to have good cache hit and low cache miss) while if freshness is important cache may not be your cup of tea (unless designed so that updates flow into cache from datasource).
With regards to that, the cache has its place in identity management for data that for which the cache expiry or update speed is much higher than rate of data staleness (like first name, last name, email id, contact information) while it would be not so good viseversa or if freshness of data overrides performance requirements.

Airlines Trying To Cut Out The Middlemen... Again

2005-11-01T09:12:00.000-05:00

Is the middleman finally going out of business especially if these service provider use eBay or google base to publish their data.

Oracle Hands Developers a Free, Open-Source Database

2005-11-01T08:56:00.000-05:00

I did not see any thing about open-sourcing the database.

RIFE/Crud 1.0: CRUD scaffolding for RIFE released

2005-10-29T22:38:00.000-04:00

Two promising technologies in two days and both do not seems to be going the way i think this development process should move. This process comes closer to my idea of how ultimately the request processing is a workflow which uses component to get the work done. This idea comes quite well in this technology. My issue is with reinventing the wheel. I would have really like the product to use a workflow definition language for achieving the request flow and data flow. On an initial review it looks like it borrowed the idea from the BEA/Apache Beehive (did i get it right?). But I would really have loved the idea of extracting database schema or from entity relationship diagram and generate objects or vice-versa automatically and drawing the request and data flow using GUI instead of editing xml and in a workflow language instead of developing your own.
The meta-data about data constraints is fine but that can not be extended to Web interface. Now what needs to be displayed as editable or non-editable and sorting decisions are not a business logic decision (as it can be an authorization decision) and thus should not live with the bean definition. It is a interface decision and should be part of that!! This is where even I am stuck w.r.t. to how to tie the workflow to interface. What is the answer? But that is a separate topic...
The technology does look promising and can work as inspiration for other technologies...

How Many Times Should We Pay For Our Software?

2005-10-29T21:23:00.000-04:00

Article just tells me that the market is maturing w.r.t. vendors getting ready. I have thought that PC is most likely a temporary path to go tho next step where people will move from accessing content using personal medium through a shared medium (similar to the way cable system evolved). With regards to this at this point the market needs to figure out the model. I think the mediums would be hosting the software and people may be ready to pay monthly rent for the service. Now the medium could be cable, phone/optical fiber or utility provider (may be electricity or who knows the water utility).
Lets leave it at that and let the market figure it out!!

Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology

2005-10-29T20:30:00.000-04:00

Interesting development!! I have always liked the idea of using google desktop search as a corporate knowledge management tool once some facility has been built to securely control and access the agents running on the individual desktop. I have had some thoughts on doing this for my own company but never got time around to do that.
Besides that I guess it is great way to capture the two ends of the information i.e. databases and desktops. I am not sure whether google search appliance could not look into these database and hence google has to depend on IBM for this type of data. Another thing which brings to life is the issues people had with desktop search at the start i.e. it brought out unwanted things from the system. Guess this goes to the idea of privacy and data access control i.e. what is searchable and what's not.

Paranoid Penguin - Single Sign-on and the Corporate Directory, Part I

2005-10-28T23:22:00.000-04:00

Now that was the quickest way to build the infrastructure and the consultants are just sucking the money for doing nothing :)
Guys lets not build something, attach "identity management" to it and tell the world we have solved the issue in 1 section. This article may be good for a small university or a Small business. Anything more than that the SSO and "identity management" is very huge project which may run from 4 months to 3yrs and needs a lot of things.

Microsoft's Vigilante Investigation of Zombies

2005-10-28T22:21:00.000-04:00

This brings back the whole idea of > if you leave door of your house unlocked and some body comes in, looks around and leaves is it punishable > if you leave door of your house unlocked and some body comes in and drinks water from your tap (is that a good analogy for wireless access point for basic web surfing) and leaves is it punishable > if you leave door of your house unlocked intentionally and some body comes and are caught is it punishable.

Attention podcasters

2005-10-28T22:13:00.000-04:00

The idea of annotating pictures is not new but doing that with video and audio!! May be that is how the next generation search engines would be able to make sense out of these type of contents till we figure out a way to dicipher an arbitirary piece of audio and video.

Artificial Scarcity, Garbage Collection and the Long Tail

2005-10-28T18:44:00.000-04:00

Great Article!!

the anatomy of a standard

2005-10-28T18:09:00.000-04:00

Redirect This!! Hmm... a money making/analytics scheme! I do not think that is the way to get it done. It seems to be more of a browser feature which allows you to select content from a website and then blog that. This way the content website does not have to change but at the same time the user is able to "grab" the content that is important for him.
Now only way a third party can get involved in this process is by making sure that user is not violating the copyright by reprinting the information which means that it can provide the capability of generating "URLs" to address the content of interest instead of displaying the entire website by may be just selecting the stuff or running autogenerated greasemonkey scripts on website on the browser.