Vinay's Tech Stuff

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has published a consultation paper asking for comments from stakeholders on important questions related to net neutrality. When it comes net neutrality all of us are stakeholders as users of the open and transparent Internet. So we should all submit our views on these important questions. Please read the document (it's long but it's very informative) and send in your responses by 8th April, 2015. Here are the questions asked: Question 1   Is it too early to establish a regulatory framework for OTT services, since internet penetration is still evolving, access speeds are generally low and there is limited coverage of high-speed broadband in the country? Or, should some beginning be made now with a regulatory framework that could be adapted to changes in the future? Question 2 Should the OTT players offering communication services (voice, messaging and video call services) through applications (resident either in the country or outsi...

Amazon Glacier is a new service from Amazon that offers archival/cold storage at a cheap & flexible on-demand price of $0.01/GB/month. They say this is highly durable storage with a durability of 99.999999999% (nine-nines, same as Amazon S3), but availability for retrieval is going to be delayed by several hours (as opposed to instant retrieval in S3 with availability of two-nines over a year). Traditionally, cold storage meant tape storage. Last time I personally used tape backup for a server was over a decade ago. Disks have taken over as the medium of backup in most companies. (except for cases that really needs cold storage forever like CERN's LHC). Let's do some simple math for a disk based system. Cheapest 3TB SATA disk that costs about $100. (Enterprise class drive would be 3 times that cost). What's the actual usable storage in this? A "3TB" drive contains 3 trillion bytes of storage and not really 3 terrabytes. And a filesystem will have a few G...

I'll make this a short post. It takes less time to set this up initially and get all of your projects conform to it than trying to retro-fit it later. And the effort spent on this will pay for itself in saved time from increased productivity ten times over. A source control repository Separate binary file assets (like lots of images, videos etc) from text file assets (like source code into separate repositories. Use a distributed version control repository, like git. Integrated Code review tool, like gerrit. Integrated Bug database, like bugzilla (it's very customizable and fast) or jira (newer versions are pretty good). Integrated code browser, like opengrok.  Every project should be buildable, preferably using autotools. Even if it's 3rdparty code, never just keep the binary. Always keep the source in good building shape. Also, save the web url or location from where it was downloaded. There maybe a bugfix or a update you may want to pick up later. Ens...

My favorite server, nginx has hit 1.0 release. With this release they have made public the svn repo holding the code with history all the way from 2002. The repo is at  svn://svn.nginx.org. Kudos to Igor and his team on this awesome piece of practical software. I see myself continuing to be a fan of both Apache httpd and nginx for a long time to come.

First off, if you haven't heard of Membase , you should check it out. It's an evolution of sorts from memcached . Typically when you use memcache or membase to store/retrieve key-value data, the value part is not a simple datatype. Instead, it would most likely be a serialized representation of some complex application specific data-structure. It's great to set/get complex datastructure with a single remote call like this. But what could become a problem very soon is the performance of the serialize/deserialize operations that needs to happen with set/get operations. With php, the obvious way to do this is to use the language's builtin serialization facility. Since the serialized format is a ASCII based format, I would guess that it's performance is not optimal (especially for deserialization). Also, one would want to do compression to reduce the data transfer and storage costs. This again adds to the set/get operation costs. I'm looking at one such applic...

Current Situation With all of the online communication services like e-mail, social media sites we use today, pretty much all of them are "free" services in the sense that we don't pay them any subscription fee for using the service. And as such the "Terms of Service" are heavily tilted towards the service provider. In most cases, the only way such free service provider makes money is by mining the data they collect when we use the service. Every time we use such service we are inputting some data for query, transmission or storage. Most of the time this data is sensitive, confidential, private data like your contacts, personal messages that reveal who you are, what you like or don't like, what, when and where you do things etc. By mining this information for profiling the user and using it to show targeted ads or to do market demographics research and sell that information to marketers are most common ways of making money. In such cases, no particular ...

Summer is almost here. With the rising ambient temperature, my macbook gets hot sooner. Especially when my browser is open it gets hotter sooner. The reason is the all pervading Adobe Flash player based ads or video players on web pages. This has made the experience of watching videos on youtube or ted.com an unpleasant experience. If I watch the video in full-screen, I notice both cores on this macbook doing full 100%. That's horribly wrong when it only needs less than 1% when I play the same video via a standalone video player like VLC. This really needs to be fixed. Something is horribly broken here. Is this just me or everyone else simply putting up with this problem?

With their latest announcement to host any type of files on Google Docs, Google is foraying into the arena of "your data in the cloud, access, organize, share - anytime from anywhere" business that we have been envisioning from a long time (over 4 years now!). What's interesting is the approach that google has taken. Instead of traditional approach of building all the features that are geared towards providing this product vision from ground up and releasing the end product, Google has built seemingly independent product and tested the waters first. And once the users have accepted each of those individual pieces reasonably well, they are integrating them all to provide a powerful experience. (Privacy conspiracy theorist may say this is much like boiling a frog in the water slowly!). Interestingly enough, Google's price of storage per GB seems to be the cheapest at the moment at $0.25/GB/year. But their initial free offering is just 1 GB with 250MB file size limi...

One thing I realized with my last Macbook (White) is that putting your macbook to sleep all the time and never shutting it down (especially overnight) is not good for your battery. By doing that I've had consumed more battery cycles and now the battery discharge time has come down to just over 2 hours. Last week I got a new macbook pro. And this time I figured out how to make it hibernate (not sleep) upon closing the lid. With that, I've managed to do only 3 cycles of battery recharge in last one week. Here's how to put your macbook to deep-sleep (hibernate): Put these two lines in your ~/.bash_profile: alias hibernateoff='sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0' alias hibernateon='sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5' And whenever you are about to close your lid (like before you go to bed), just turn hibernate on by invoking hibernateon in terminal. At other times, when you don't want it to go to deep-sleep, just turn hibernate off. This is useful when you close y...

For my work e-mail, I've used Microsoft Outlook with Exchange server for 2 years and I liked it a lot. Especially the global address book integration, expanding distribution lists, calendar/meeting scheduling features are awesome. In my current workplace, we don't have Exchange. And I'm on a macbook. So I've a choice of Apple Mail or Thunderbird or Microsoft Entourage. Tried Microsoft Entourage - didn't like it - it's nothing like outlook and it's UI is as if it's been resurrected from 1970s. And without exchange server to connect with, it doesn't have much advantage compared to others. I tried Apple mail also for a couple of months. Didn't like it either. Although it looks great compared to entourage or thunderbird, it isn't great for handling lots of e-mails in lots of IMAP folders. It's search is also lacking in speed. Then I tried Thunderbird. I've been a big fan of Mozilla for a long time. And being a supporter of open-sourc...

I've seen many people struggling with git manpages or getting confused with myriads of commands in git. If you are one of them, I would recommend you to check out stuff done by this cool guy, Scott Chacon . Specifically check out this presentation here http://gitcasts.com/posts/railsconf-git-talk The pdf of that presentation is also available there. Understanding the concepts of how git works internally is very easy and helps a lot in understanding git commands and improves your mileage with git. For users on Windows, tortoisegit is has come up quite well. It's almost feature-equivalent to tortoisesvn and has 25 more features relevant to git.

I've been a long time Vim (not vi) user and occasionally I find people around me questioning my choice and comparing it to tools like Visual Studio. I agree Visual Studio is a great IDE. But Vim is a great editor. I would love Visual Studio editor with Vim key bindings. I came across this Vi Emulator http://www.viemu.com/ that does exactly that. Personally I have not had the opportunity to use it (as I've moved to Mac and development mostly on Linux). But I found a very useful Vim cheat sheet on the author's website. Take a look. It's worth printing and hanging it near your workspace.

For quite sometime now I've been facing space crunch on my laptop and have been using various external storage devices. I'm reluctant to put any important piece of information on these devices due to security and privacy concerns. Unlike my laptop (and the disk within it), these devices will not be in my sight all the time and hence my reluctance to trust any confidential data with them. I've thought about using some software based encryption solutions. But I need them to work seamlessly on multiple operating systems as these portable storage devices will be connected to different machines running different OSs. I've been wishing for a crypto device that would sit between the computer and the portable disk and provide transparent encryption/decryption functionality. Such a device would have to be small. It can be powered from the computer over USB. It should have a biometric identification device embedded on it for authentication. One such device could be used to interf...

Recently someone sent me a link to splashtop , in context of some work I was doing on Asus Eeepc. Splashtop is a OEM installed OS that boots off a embedded flash/hidden-partition device on your PC. It uses Bootsplash , SquashFS , Blackbox , SCIM and Linux kernel . Splashtop's raison d'etre is to provide instant-on/off experience to PC. Since PC boot times are slow, most people don't even turn off their machines. Splashtop takes about a second to show it's splashscreen right after BIOS on a Asus notebook. From this screen, you can launch virtual appliance'cified Firefox or Skype or boot Windows etc. One thing to note is that each of these operations in turn may take 5 to 25 seconds. I wonder if this is a feasible approach to solve this problem. Boot process which involves hardware initialization, OS initializtion, startup application initialization - all of these operations have to take "some" amount time. And we know that most of these are IO bound due to...

Finally, the Guinness World Record results are out. Here's what is said on Download Day page. Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web. I even got a certificate for participating in the event!

Today www.linkedin.com HTTPS certificate expired. Seems they have forgotten to renew it. Quite shameful for a company that promises privacy and security of user’s information. Here’s what Firefox 3 told me when I visited the website and tried to sign-in. Logging in bypassing this cert security error is not an option for me. So, for all practical purposes, linkedin is down for me.

The release date for Firefox 3 has been announced. It is also the " Download Day " when Mozilla community will attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. You can pledge for the same here . Firefox 3 has some very good new features that makes it a compelling upgrade. Here's a field guide to FF3. Enjoy!

This test was done with Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on the latest versions of Firefox 3 and Safari available as of today. It overall the test results indicate Safari is faster. But the individual results need to be looked at and decided which tests really matter in real world and how they affect our daily browsing speed. TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS ============================================================================= ** TOTAL **: 1.07x as fast 3216.0ms +/- 1.8% 3003.4ms +/- 1.1% significant ============================================================================= 3d: - 393.0ms +/- 5.0% 377.8ms +/- 1.3% cube: ?? 131.4ms +/- 14.2% 140.0ms +/- 2.1% not conclusive: might be *1.07x as slow* morph: 1.19x as fast 136.8ms +/- 1.5% 115.4ms +/- 2.5% significant raytrace: 1.02x a...

Windows Live writer is such a good blogging software that it alone justifies installing vmware fusion+windows on my Macbook. Apple really doesn't have any product that comes anywhere close to Windows Live Writer for blogging. For that matter nobody has. Among all products under Live brand this alone is generations ahead. Keep Rocking!

I've got a macbook at work. And for the last couple of days while trying to figure out how to do various simple tasks I have been thoroughly annoyed by this critically acclaimed OS. http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/feb/top-x-list-of-mac-os-x-annoyances This blog summarizes my annoyances very well. Is Apple listening to it's customers? If it wants to get more corporate customers or grow it's market share, they better do something about these things.