Playing with Seagate’s expansion drive

I was recently gifted Seagate’s expansion drive by my sister. Very timely gift when I’m moving out of Yahoo! and have a few GBs of data to backup .. With 320GB capacity, it is serving the purpose well..

However, I had earlier formatted the drive (as NTFS). Windows recommended and promised this is the best option and I believed these guys .. And when I plugged the device into Mac, it stripped off my writing privilege and gave just read access.. Ok, left with 2 choices now:

1. Reformat the disk using FAT (HFS doesn’t work with Windows and the safest Filesystem for formatting seems to be FAT)
2. Use a software to do the writing. I downloaded MacFuse, but I guess the NTFS compatibility pieces are commercial (Did not drill down much here). Let me know your experience with MacFuse.

Took option 1 after backing up the data in disk (There was something about reviving the data post erasing, Didn’t try it out!!). Anyway, now all set for backing up data and I’m currently moving multiple GBs to the disk happily.

I’m praying Amazon gives me a Mac laptop as well (or probably should plan buying one in future).. Love the user experience and flexibility Mac provides!!

Web 2.0 – Setting up my online social world

“Mastering a social network for effective use seems to be an art and pardon my ignorance in this space (I’m learning the mastery, I suppose )”

A short intro of self in this online social world:

• A sporadic blogger active for short period of times.
• Have tried out twitter in the past for status updates
• Reasonably frequent user of facebook to keep in touch with friends
• Use flickr for photo sharing.
• And visit a lot more sites to keep my self up to date…

What do I really want to do with my social networks?
Sitting back and thinking about what do I really want to do with this online social world – My answer was “Share my quick and long thoughts/photos with my friends”, “be up to date with what my friends are upto”, “Have a sense of whats happening in the world – tech and nontech”

Okay.. So, Where are my friends in the internet?? Facebook – most of them.. Hardly anyone in my network is active in orkut these days.. This implies – Whatever I find interesting and my experiences/thoughts/photos will have to be shared in facebook..

What other tools do I need?
I need a blog for my long writings – I use wordpress for this… Twitter/FB should be good enough for microblogging.. I’m happy with flickr for managing my photos.. Too many networks to deal with…Yahoo is planning a meta social network – Nice!!!, but it is still not ready..

So my solution which I think should work:

• Blogging: WordPress will be my solution
• Microblogging: I’ve still not made up my mind here – Twitter Vs FB status updates.
• Photos: Flickr
• Friends network: Facebook
• Keeping self up to date: I still visit sites like techcrunch, mashable.com, yahoo! news, finance etc daily to get some news.. Need to investigate if this can be made better.

Hooking these together:

• Blogs (WordPress): Using “twitterfeed” to notify Facebook (and Twitter – just to experiment).
• Photos (Flickr): Using “My Flickr” app to notify Facebook.
• Microblogging (Possibly twitter): Using “Selective tweets” facebook application to notify Facebook.

End this blog dude
For now, I don’t see twitter being very useful for me (All twitter fans – please excuse!!!..) since there is huge overlap between my fb friends list and twitter friends list.. I see the tweets redundantly in both places.. And, I’m currently doing the same .. One thing though I love about it is following the celebrities.. And Btw, LinkedIn is out of scope here – I am not talking about professional networks..

So, why setup all this??

• I seem to have some free time now and thought I’ll experiment with this.
• I see a behavioral change in self to speak out my mind through these networks (and at times spam you guys).. I want to see if I can share better stuff in a better manner..

Crossed fingers.. Will keep this post updated as I experiment more with these integrations..

Y! India Maps – in your language

I am beginning to love Y! India Maps after the addition of driving routes.. Keep an eye on this product, I am optimistic this is going to rock.. See the blog in in.next*.

The localization of the product is what I like the most. It supports multiple languages, the routes are shown in the way we verbally discuss in India, auto fares, walking route etc..

No more asking “boss, how do i go to garuda mall from here?”. Try the product yourself here – in.maps.yahoo.com

“Openness” – A new face of the web

Get started

There is an interesting transition happening in the world wide web and I had plans of recording my understanding and views in a blog for a long time and finally it is happening now.

The web had always been a place where people interact with it through web pages/web sites. The data was not structured and hence an application talking to it was really difficult. Search engines started interacting with these pages for their own reasons, yet the structural view of the data was not there. Web services and/or microformats started solving this problem. If you are not new to web services, you already know the importance of an application interacting with a webapp.

Big players in the game

Web services was a theory for sometime and quickly the value of it was realised and the big players started getting into the game. The whole new era of “openness” began then. Yahoo (developer.yahoo.com), Google (code.google.com), AOL (dev.aol.com), Amazon (aws.amazon.com), EBay (developer.ebay.com) started exposing a lot of useful web services. Microsoft has a strong developer community, but they are yet to have a good foot print in web services. For sometime, web services did not get the attention from business perspective and then Amazon/Ebay started proving that this approach could make a lot of money too. The game started becoming intensive then.

Openness meant more than just web services

Openness did not just mean web services and this was realized very quickly. Easy to integrate widgets, which are some HTML code and in some cases javascript, started making a lot of difference to the web. People started using these pre-built, highly customizable widgets more easily than web services. For an example, see the mybloglog widget “Recent readers” in this page. I spent less than 5 minutes to put it here.

The facebook platform made a huge impact. It brought in new dimensions to openness namely “Opening in” and “Opening out”. “Opening in” is what facebook does, you provision third party applications/content to be visible as a part of your application. “Opening out” is giving the rich set of data you have through webservices or widgets.

Authentication is a big problem

The initial web services offered include search, maps etc. These were general services and the only problem was the authentication of the application accessing it. Later, companies like Yahoo decided to provide user specific data like mail, photos(flickr) as web services. This would definitely need the user to authenticate himself and then to authenticate the application to use the data on his behalf. Yahoo used BBAuth as the protocol for such authentication. Google used AuthSub for similar authentication needs and companies like Amazon, ebay started having their own protocols.

To avoid reinventing the wheel, OAuth and OpenID came to the rescue. OpenID has been existing for sometime now. It solves the problem of Single sign-on and it is intended to solve only that problem (it marginally extends to share some user specific data like profile info through extensions). OAuth solves the problem BBAuth, AuthSub etc were solving. In fact, OAuth just picks the best out of the existing auth mechanisms and standardizes them.

“Social” and “Openness”

Social networks and related websites like facebook, myspace, youtube have created a great buzz and now we are well connected to our community (or atleast lets hope so). How did they enter the openness game? As discussed earlier, facebook entered in with “Opening in” strategy.

The retalliation by other social networks was the new standard “OpenSocial”. Google initiated the standard and has got a good support from other social networks like hi5, myspace etc. The concept was “OpenSocial” is “develop once, deploy in multiple places”. OpenSocial has now become an independent foundation backed by Google, Yahoo, Myspace.

Mashups and startup culture

Openness has facilitated mashups, which in my understanding is a cool application built by using available open services. Visit http://gallery.yahoo.com to see the mashups using Y! services (And I was one of the developers working on this product). Google, facebook, myspace have their own gallery of mashups. Openness strategy as discussed is getting a wide adoption and has opened a huge opportunity for startups. We see a lot of startups using amazon s3 services for data storage. A lot of startups have their applications in facebook and have been very successful.

And the end

Openness is catching up in mobile world as well. “Yahoo! Go 3.0″, “Android” are some efforts worth mentioning. I am not diving deep into the mobile world here. What next? Look around for more news about openness. A recent techcrunch article was found about possibility of google big table web service (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/04/source-google-to-launch-bigtable-as-web-service/). You have all the pieces open and ready to reuse including infrastructure, communications, cool services and there are more to come. Go ahead! Add value to the web (or even desktop) and of course, add value to yourself .

Update: Yahoo! has announced its openness strategy, read the blog here. It has received a great traction and I am proud to be a part of this exciting effort.

Rewired Yahoo! Search: Back with a bang

Yahoo! Seach, Do you use it? If no, its time to reconsider. Yahoo! launched SearchAssist a few months back and it has helped Yahoo! gain a significant amount of search market share.

Now there is an exciting feature waiting to go public. Want a preview of that? Go ahead and read this blog.

How would the new experience be?

Hmmm, interesting… The information presented in the result is not a garbled up text anymore, it would be an organized information. As a user, you’ve got a better search experience.

Who will make this result better?

Now, its time to take a look at the other side of the coin. Who will make this experience better? Is it Yahoo!? How would they pull organized information for every site? The answer is “No, Yahoo will not do this”. The third party developers will do it. It relates to the “Opening in” section of the openness article

Developers will have a wizard which will help them develop a module which will organize the search result from a specific website, say http://www.test.com. The users will have to add this module and the magic happens. Whenever http://www.test.com shows up in the search results, the result is well rendered.

Sign up for the developer preview in Yahoo! Developer Network (Click here).

What do I gain as a developer?

Good question. If you are a site owner, you get more incoming traffic with a better organized result.

Can I get my site to go up in the search result ranking?

No, ranking is not in your control. But if you make your result attractive and make sure you get better clicks, you might indirectly go up in the ranking.

What next?

Developers, go ahead and monkey around. Others, switch to Yahoo! search if you haven’t done already.

Read the techcrunch article about Open Search platform here.

JSP charset

My java class was like following:

class XXX {

static public String test() {

return “யாமறிந்த”;

}

}

My JSP code did the following:

String str = XXX.test();

String str2 = “யாமறிந்த”;

if(str.equals(str2)) {

out.println(“These are equal”);

}

else {

out.println(“These aren’t equal”);

}

The result is “These aren’t equal”. Surprised? It took me about a few hours to figure out this was the root cause for my UI showing up “????” whenever “str” was output in browser.

The fix is simple. The following line should be added in your jsp page:

<%@ page contentType=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ pageEncoding=”UTF-8″ %>

The default pageEncoding of JSP is “ISO-XXX” and hence these problems.

NetBeans 6.1 Vs Eclipse 3.3.1: My observations

I spent the day investigating NetBeans 6.1 IDE and comparing it with Eclipse 3.3.1.

Motivations for this investigation

I am currently using Eclipse 3.3.1 for development in Java. Eclipse was satisfactory, but writing XML docs and JSP code using Eclipse was a pain. I found it difficult to get good plugins to ease my work. And finally I had a chat with Venkatavaradan, out team’s X-architect, yesterday. He marketed NetBeans very well. I quickly upgraded my RAM on his advice and started my experiments.

What did I do?

Disclaimer: This is a naive comparison and not meant to be very technical. It does not contain any benchmarked results.

I am currently working on a web application (JSP, HTML, JS) using Java for back-end. Eclipse IDE was good for the back-end dev. But front end dev was very difficult. NetBeans (183MB) download comes with a good IDE for JSP, XML, XSD apart from Java (the list is actually much bigger). As a bonus, I could run my webapp in a sandbox and debug my JSP code too. Ooooh!! that is going to increase my productivity in a big way.

And additionally, I was hitting too many bugs in Eclipse. I had a src and test (as many dev would have), it was hitting random compiling errors which used to be fixed by just changing the name of a class and renaming it back. Yeeeeeeks!!!

One minor prob I’m facing with NetBeans is, it doesn’t give a consolidated list of warnings. It reports on a per-file basis. But I found a bug filed for that too.

Venkat, the architect, was also talking about many other features NetBeans is better in. To name a few, REST Service development, Service descriptions, UML to code generation etc.. Interesting…

Both Eclipse and NetBeans have a very good extendible framework, the point is the package that NetBeans offers seems to be excellent compared to Eclipse. Both these communities seem to be active.

I haven’t investigated the following the hardware comparisons. Come on, hardware is cheap and getting immaterial these days and I’m lazy to that benchmarking . And I haven’t done any investigations on the history of these tools.

Where can these be downloaded?

Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

NetBeans: http://www.netbeans.org/

What is the conclusion?

My initial observations moves the balance towards NetBeans 6.1.

Happy Coding and debugging!!

Firefox 3 – The countdown

Firefox 3 is scheduled to be released on june 17th.. Honestly, I am not too excited about it…

But the quick screencasts I’ve seen and a few demos, I see a lot of change from the older version..

Firebox blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/14/the-countdown-to-download-day/

A quick view of the new features: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/06/12/the-ultimate-guide-to-firefox-3/

Yahoo! BOSS – taking the next big step in openness and search

Following the openness initiative and the searchmonkey announcement, Yahoo! is taking the next big step in openness and search.

Yahoo! BOSS (Build your own search service) is the big leap that Yahoo! has announced. Through BOSS, Yahoo! gives access to its investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure to third party developers and organizations. The third-parties are allowed to add their own assets and make a huge business from this opportunity.

More details are available here.

Head first design patterns

Of all those boring technical books I’ve read in the past, this book definitely stood out.

This book walks you through the important design patterns sighting very simple and appealing examples. Certain sections are written in conversational style. There are also some sections where patterns discuss with each other explaining their applicability. I felt like reading a comic. If you are thinking about learning the basics of design patterns, this book is worth investing on. I wish all tech books are like this … Interesting effort! Looking for more such books in the head first series.

O reilly link: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007126/cover.html