jugad's Journal

MagLev - Ruby that scales? Fast Ruby VM from Gemstone

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:06:05 GMT

Great logo :)

Scaling (or the lack of it) is one of the most commonly cited potential issues with Ruby (and hence with Ruby on Rails, which has otherwise gained a huge amount of traction in the industry as a rapid web app development framework).

So this news about MagLev, a new Ruby VM that's supposed to be very fast, is of definite interest.

Saw this news on Antonio Cangiano's blog.

It's a new Ruby VM from Gemstone, an enterprise software company that has been around for a while and already has some other enterprise products.

The Gemstone executive team seems to have a good background.

Obie Fernandez, a well-known Ruby developer, thinks its big news. Here's what he has to say about it.

The speed improvements mentioned for MagLev over the standard Ruby interpreter, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) are claimed to be of the order of 8x to 60x.

It has "an object persistence model that can hold up to 17 Petabytes (17 Million Gigabytes)" of data.

An interesting point about it, is that it may bypass the relational model and hence the well-known object-relational impedance mismatch, to overcome which, ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) software such as ActiveRecord (used in Ruby on Rails) and many others have been developed, for various languages.

Which would also mean, probably, no SQL can be used. Instead you'd probably have to use their proprietary object-persistence API's that can let you read and write data between memory and persistent storage.

A couple of potential cons, at least as of now:

- MagLev's implementation of the Ruby language is not complete, as per Antonio's post.

- It's not going to be either fully open source (though parts of it might be), or free (except maybe in a limited version).

- Another point some bloggers have mentioned that using it would mean dependence on a single vendor, Gemstone.

Whatever the case may be, it should be interesting to see how it turns out, and whether MagLev gains industry adoption.

Vasudev Ram

Pingdom come :-) *

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:47:00 GMT

Pingdom.com is a cool web-based web site monitoring tool that I saw some time ago. They provide multiple checks such as the overall time for your web page to load, the time for each object in the page (such as the main HTML page itself, each image, etc.) to load, and so on. An interesting and useful service, methinks ...

They also have a free Full Page Test that "loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes)". It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser, and gives a nice report on the load time of each object, and the overall load time.

Plus, there's another tool called Ping and TraceRoute test

On a related note, I had written a small network monitoring tool - I had called it pinger.sh :-), some time back when I was working at Infosys Technologies. Wrote it in a combination of C, sh and Perl, to run on UNIX. This was in response to a request from some Infosys system administrator friends of mine for such a tool. It was just a simple tool - all it did was ping a given server (host) or servers repeatedly at some given interval, parse (with regular expressions) the ping output, and then log the parsed output, but it was useful - they deployed it on many servers in the Infosys network and later told me that it was of help.

Though it was simple, one somewhat neat feature of it was that it would do the ping every n seconds, exactly on the second (where n was usually some number of minutes, like 5 or 10) - this being a request from the administrators, for better looking output to show to their bosses :-) - I had to spend a little time figuring out how to do that; ended up rolling my own solution to it, in C code (hence the need for C - all the rest was done in sh and Perl) - though I later learned that it might have been more easily doable using the gettimeofday UNIX system call. Good fun ...

I also published an article about pinger.sh in the internal Infosys knowledge management system, called the Body of Knowledge (BOK).

* The subject used for this post - "Pingdom come" - is a play on words - referring to the phrase "till kingdom come" - which I've read in a few places, but not sure what the exact allusion is to.

Their company blog's name is another nice play on words - Royal Pingdom :-)

Vasudev Ram

World's first programmable newspaper?

vasudevram@gmail.com — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:41:11 GMT

Just saw this on programming.reddit.com - its from the ReadWriteWeb site:

New York Times API coming

Excerpts:

' The New York Times newspaper is working on an API that aims to make the entire newspaper "programmable." '

' In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper's structured content -- reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. "How far we don't know." '

Sounds interesting - this could open up many new possibilities. such as mashups, analysis, etc. Also seems to be in line with the trend of more and more things becoming open nowadays, spurred by the Internet, of course.

On a side note, but related, I've been of the opinion, for a while now - as I said here (see the comments on that post), that almost all software should be written to be programmable, right from the start. That is, the software, even if is is a large subsystem or a full application, should be written to be callable (by other code, as a subroutine).

Then write a caller routine to call that subsystem, full app, or smaller module, whatever it is. Though there are bound to be counter-arguments to this (mainly, that it'll take more time), there are clear benefits - the additional code will usually only take a little time, and the advantages to be gained are:

- the code can much more easily be reused for other purposes (and anyone who's being programming for more than a short time knows that most software gets used for other purposes, and lives longer than you expect (if its any good at all, that is)

- the code can more easily be called from a test harness for testing purposes

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Desperate or brilliant? Microsoft's latest move in search

vasudevram@gmail.com — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:42:37 GMT

This is recent - Microsoft reportedly proposes to give back some money to users who search via its sites, going by the CPA model (Click Per Action), i.e. after they actually end up buying something via clicking on one of the ads they get to see during the search.

There's been a wide range of reactions to this move, on the Net, from quite negative to positive. Here are some:

Alley Insider

Search Engine Land and Search Engine Land again

CNet News.com

GigaOm

Forbes.com's Wendy Tanaka

TechCrunch's latest post on it - they had a few before - see the links in above post.

As this Bob Marley song goes (video below), "time alone will tell" whether it's a good move or not ...

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

More on "1 million Linux-based motherboards a month"

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sun, 18 May 2008 16:29:46 GMT

I just blogged here (on my Tumblelog *) about Asus planning to release 1 million Linux-based motherboards a month with the "instant-booting" Splashtop Linux distribution embedded in those motherboards. (BTW, Asus calls Splashtop "Express Gate".)

The Splashtop site.

This post here has more about that news.

Splashtop is by a company called DeviceVM. (They have a URL but it seems to redirect back to the Splashtop site.)

The management seems to have a good background and they're funded to about $20 million by multiple venture capitalists:

"In August 2006, DeviceVM raised more than $10 million in a Series A, backed by Storm Ventures, DFJ Dragon Fund, Tim Draper, Asus, iD Innovation (started by Acer founder Stan Shih), Harbinger Ventures (started by Mitac-Synnex Group Chairman Matthew Miau), and strategic angel investors affiliated with major PC manufacturers (Intel, Lenovo, HP, eMachines / Gateway, Packard Bell, Foxconn, Quanta, Compal, etc.) In October 2007, DeviceVM raised additional $10 million, with existing investors, as well as new strategic investors from HTC, Merus Capital, Presidio(Sumitomo) and WR Hambrecht."

Their board of advisors has some well-known people, like:

Larry Augustin – former CEO of VA Linux (SourceForge / Slashdot / Linux.com)

Gokul Rajaram – former Director of Product Management for Google AdSense

Salman Ullah – former Vice President of Corporate Development at Google

Haven't seen any PC's yet with the Splashtop-enabled motherboards. But if it works as advertised (they claim it boots in 5 seconds or less), I'd say it would definitely be a useful and innovative product, and I'll check it out and consider buying a PC with it, once available.

[ BTW, I recently started blogging more frequently on my Tumblelog. The plan is to make frequent short posts there, and continue making regular posts on this LiveJournal blog (jugad.livejournal.com). Sometimes I may start with a short post on some topic on my Tumblelog, and follow it up (as in this case) with a more detailed, longer post here, on the same topic, if I feel it makes sense.

My Tumblelog is here and its RSS feed is here. ]

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

GullFoss: Europe's largest waterfall and OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun; ODFDOM

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:44:14 GMT

What connection can there be between a waterfall and OpenOffice.org?
There is one ...

GullFoss is Europe's largest waterfall, in Iceland.

Click image below for bigger view
Tip: then click on the resulting image again :) (your browser should support it, though), and make sure to scroll around both vertically and horizontally to see the full picture ...

GullFoss is also the name of the OpenOffice.org Engineering team at Sun.

They recently released ODFDOM.

Excerpt:

"ODFDOM is the new opensource (LGPLv3), multi-layered, lightweight, OpenDocument centric API with a Java 5 reference implementation."

[ It's the successor of Odf4j.

The odf4j project's objective is to provide an API for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents directly in Java applications.
]

ODFDOM seems worth checking out ...

Vasudev Ram

HP to Acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion

vasudevram@gmail.com — Fri, 16 May 2008 20:40:51 GMT

This is a big deal all right.

Here's the official announcement by HP on May 13, 2008:

HP to Acquire EDS for $13.9 Billion

Related links about the deal:

Ostatic.com open source people on the deal, and how it may relate to open source

[ OStatic.com is a member site of the Giga Omni Media Network. Here's what they (the people at OStatic.com) think about open source:

"
After decades of collective experience writing and consuming software, we remain excited by the power and liberation that Open Source Software provides. It harnesses the wisdom of brilliant minds and unleashes the creativity of individuals like never before. We agree with the pundits who believe that the Open Source Software movement is the single most disruptive trend in the $750B IT software and services industry since the emergence of the Internet."

]

Vinnie Mirchandani of Deal Architect on the deal

Om Malik of GigaOm on the deal

Some Indian perspective:

The Times of India on the deal

The Financial Express on the deal

CIOL on the deal

Let's see how this one works out ...

Maybe more comments later as things evolve.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Big news? Google App Engine launching

vasudevram@gmail.com — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:59:52 GMT

For some developers, this could be quite big news ...

First saw it on TechCrunch:

Excerpt:

"... Google App Engine, an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store service ..."

Google App Engine

According to Mike Arrington, the Google App Engine site is down till it launches.

See the Google Blogoscoped post about it for some more information ...

Vasudev Ram

And now for something deadly serious ...

vasudevram@gmail.com — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:14:23 GMT

Peter Cooper's Ruby Red shoes!

Red hot, huh? :)

Vasudev Ram

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for 44.6 billion dollars

vasudevram@gmail.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:23:55 GMT

First saw this earlier today on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for 44.6 billion dollars

First TechCrunch post about it.

First Mashable post about it.

Of course the entire blogosphere and (netosphere:-) is buzzing about it.

Apart from the predictable positive and negative reactions, the anti-trust and suchlike regulators in the U.S. and Europe are going to examine this potential deal closely, according to at least one report.

This one should be really interesting, as it has the potential to affect almost all of us Net users for better or worse, depending on how things turn out. That is, if the deal does go through at all, of course - it's not a given that it will.

So if I come across any interesting news about this event, I'll post about it here.

Anyway, for a start, here is Sramana Mitra's first post on this news".

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Nokia to acquire Trolltech for $153 million

vasudevram@gmail.com — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:41:32 GMT

Saw this recently.

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

This BusinessWeek article about it (as well as some of the other Net sites that reported this news), says that the acquisition for $153 million.

Don't have much of an idea about the pros and cons of this acquisition, but the author of the BusinessWeek article above seems to think its a good move by Nokia.

Trolltech seems to be a good company - I had blogged about one of their main products, Qt, some time back, and had tried it out some. It's very good. Qt is considered by many to be a very good cross-platform GUI toolkit (for C++, now also has Java support via Jambi), and a good example of a well-designed object-oriented library. They also have another similar product for mobile devices, Qtopia, which was developed after, and based a lot upon, Qt, and Nokia is probably acquiring Trolltech because of both products and the synergy between them (because of the common codebase and probably similar API's, its likely that Qt apps can easily be ported to Qtopia and vice versa, which will make for cost savings and faster development time).

Some of the articles about this Nokia acquisition mention that Google Earth and the Skype client, among other products, are developed using Qt. I think I read somewhere that Adobe Photoshop is also developed using Qt.

Vasudev Ram

Sun buying MySQL for $1 billion

vasudevram@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:32:12 GMT

First saw this last night on TechCrunch. By now the news has probably spread all over the Net :)
...

Yes, its true - Sun is buying MySQL for $1 billion.

Here's the official post about it from Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

As lots of others have commented, including of course, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Sramana Mitra, among others, this is good news for customers in general and the open source movement in particular, and looks like a good fit for both companies.

My first reaction (confirmed a few hours later by reading the details in Jonathan's post above) were that Sun and MySQL can now optimize Solaris and the MySQL database to work for better performance, etc. - just as Oracle had done with Linux, starting a few years ago (though there was no acquisition involved there). Leveraging things like ZFS can probably improve MySQL response, scalability, etc. Jonathan's post mentions quite a few other ways in which he thinks all stakeholders (not just Sun, MySQL, and their customers, but also Sun's OEM partners) will benefit. Of course it depends on how well they execute on the intended goals.

[ Make sure to read the post about "OEM partners" above - a pretty interesting one by Jonathan again. I love this sentence of his from that post:

"As I said to a journalist today after the announcement, vendors that don't offer choice can only serve customers that don't want choice... while IBM and Sun can serve the rest."

]

Vasudev Ram

P.S. The other news in Sramana's post above (titled "Today's Two Big Acquisitions"), is about
Oracle acquiring BEA Systems for $8.5 billion - which, though a much bigger sum, and may well be similarly synergistic, is not potentially as game-changing as the Sun acquisition, at least IMO ...

Test post - my new Conduit.com account

vasudevram@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:15:48 GMT

The stuff below may not work - work in progress ...

Testing newly created account:

Conduit.com

Vasudev Ram

Metaweb Gets $42 Million more in funding

vasudevram@gmail.com — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:36:33 GMT

Seen on Mashable

Metaweb Gets $42 Million; There’s Hope Yet For Semantic Web

From their site: Freebase is an open, shared database of the world's knowledge.

$42 million is a somewhat large amount - may be a good sign for MetaWeb and FreeBase that the investors are putting in that much. (For comparison, IIRC, Google got $25 million in their first round of funding - from KPCB and Sequioa, two of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, and they were a very hot startup then. But obviously, this doesn't necessarily mean that MetaWeb is going to become as big and successful as Google :).

I read about that (Google's funding) in the book The Google Story which I recently finished reading - a pretty interesting book, all about Google's start and subsequent growth).

Might blog a bit about that book later, commenting on some of the points that particularly interested me.

I had come across FreeBase a while ago, and signed up. (Anyone can sign up to collaborate on adding information to FreeBase.)
Entered a few items into it. Should be interesting to see how it evolves over time, and how useful an information resource it becomes. It's value will depend a lot upon inputs by users, so if you're interested in seeing it become more useful, contribute (unbiased) information to it, and spread the word ...

Vasudev Ram

GNU PDF is good news!

vasudevram@gmail.com — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:44:51 GMT

Saw about this a few days ago ...

GNU PDF - a High-priority project of the FSF

From the main page:

The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies.

Adobe's page about PDF

Excerpt from above page:

"Invented by Adobe Systems and perfected over 15 years, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) lets you capture and view robust information—from any application, on any computer system—and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe® PDF to communicate their ideas and vision."

About Adobe

Wikipedia entry for Portable Document Format

Exciting days ahead, and I'm gonna be a part of the action.

I'll be writing a few more posts about these developments in the coming days, so stay tuned if they interest you.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Kapow Technologies and openkapow

vasudevram@gmail.com — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:30:28 GMT

Interesting-looking company/product/site ... for creating web mashups.

Kapow Technologies

They claim to be "one of the fastest-growing software firms in the world" with many customers, including Global 2000 companies and Web 2.0 startups.

openkapow

openkapow looks like a site by them for developers, where anyone can sign up to create mashups using their software.

Vasudev Ram

Free software brings affordability, transparency to mathematics

vasudevram@gmail.com — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:22:58 GMT

Another good article seen on programming.reddit.com:

Excerpts:

"... open-source tool based at the University of Washington, won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software."

[ I googled for Les Trophées du Libre (site must be in French, by the name) and found this English version of the site as well. ]

"'I think we can be better than the commercial versions,' he said. 'I really want it to be the best mathematical software in the world.'

"Sage research and student support is made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation. The Sage meetings are supported by various mathematical associations. The project has also received several thousand dollars in private donations. "

Free software brings affordability, transparency to mathematics

Vasudev Ram

Predicting the Future - the full speech by Alan Kay (not just the quote)

vasudevram@gmail.com — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:22:41 GMT

A lot of people would have heard of the famous quote by Alan Kay:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Came across ( via programming.reddit.com ) the speech (at the Stanford Computer Forum) in which he said that:

Predicting The Future

Great speech ... check it out ...

Vasudev Ram

"PDF is everywhere"; Flying Saucer looks cool

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:34:09 GMT

"PDF is everywhere",

says Joshua Marinacci of Sun Microsystems on his blog.

Joshua is on the Swing team at Sun; he recently co-authored O'Reilly's Swing Hacks.

Flying Saucer looks cool

He also leads Flying Saucer, a very interesting looking project for PDF generation. Flying Saucer is a Java library that lets you generate PDF from XHTML and CSS inputs. I'm planning to check it out for possible use in my xtopdf toolkit. I took a look at the code for the Flying Saucer examples, its quite small for what it does - looks like a well-written library.

Vasudev Ram

AddThis.com looks hot

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:02:25 GMT

Got to know about it recently and signed up.

AddThis.com

Their Alexa and Technorati ranks look high (as per the graphs on their site).

Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy PR Worldwide, recommends AddThis (again, according to the AddThis site).

I signed up. They have cool widgets that you can put on:

1) a web page (the bookmark widget)

2) a blog (the feed widget)

Check out the bottom of the home page of my site - DancingBison.com - for an example of the bookmark widget.

Vasudev Ram

My TechDirt Insight Community badges - test post

vasudevram@gmail.com — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:02:50 GMT

My TechDirt Insight Community badges - test post.

Smaller:

Larger:

Vasudev Ram

A $2500 supercomputer

vasudevram@gmail.com — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:29:39 GMT

A $2500 supercomputer

The post is actually titled "Ubuntu Everywhere" (you can guess what that means), but also mentions the Microwulf supercomputer (built using Ubuntu Linux) that costs $2500. I haven't checked it out as clustering / supercomputing is not my thing, but if the claims are true, it might be useful and cost-effective for scientific and industrial organizations, particularly ones in less developed economies that have budget constraints ...

Saw the above post on Andrew Binstock's blog. Andrew should be well known to C/C++/UNIX programmers with more than a few years experience. He has been:

- the editor in chief of UNIX Review
- and earlier of the C Gazette
- for the past 16 years, a judge for the Jolt awards.

among other things.

Vasudev Ram

Google release Chart API

vasudevram@gmail.com — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:42:42 GMT

Seen on InfoQ.

Google release Chart API

Also see:

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/12/embed-charts-in-webpages-with-one-of.html

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Vasudev Ram

Gmail now has AIM chat

vasudevram@gmail.com — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:31:52 GMT

AIM chat in Gmail

It uses OpenAIM.

Referring to OpenAIM, this trend seems to be catching on -
of Internet companies opening up their sites and platforms
to developers via APIs that they can access
(via the Web or Internet). It should spur
more software innovation, if developers do take up
on it and try to create some useful services
on top of such APIs.

I've been seeing quite a few other companies
doing this opening up of their platform
via APIs in the recent past.

Vasudev Ram

Sabeer Bhatia's new idea: Nanocity

vasudevram@gmail.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:24:32 GMT

He's creating a "sustainable city with world class infrastructure and to create an
ecosystem for innovation ..."

Nanocity

Vasudev Ram