Netflix Open Source – Inauguration

07 Feb

Today, Netflix conducted the inaugural open house of its opensource applications.This is the first ever public event of Netflix in its opensource efforts that started almost three years ago.

 

Netflix OSS Inauguration

There are several opensource projects that Netflix lined up for this event. Here are the ones I personally liked

  • Asgard: Web application for application deployment and cloud management. I like the simplicity and focus of this web application. Primarily speaking the AWS language, this is a great tool.
  • Denominator: This project doesn’t feature yet on Netflix’s github page (at least at the time of the writing) but this is something very close to the challenge I face regularly – How to ensure the name services integrity and availability in business continuity situations.

Visit Netflix’s opensource page at http://netflix.github.com/. This site presents you with a familiar Netflix streaming interface to the company’s new baby.

Netflix OSS

The next meetup is scheduled for March 13th.

 

1111 it is

27 Oct

My WordPress dashboard tells me that I have 1111 posts so far on my personal blog site. Blogging is a habit I picked up while working at Sun Microsystems. I used to blog on their employee blog roll on various technical and personal topics. Sometime in 2006, the need for blogging on personal topics increased and I felt that it is more ethical for me to start writing on my personal blog site. Tried various softwares and launched my blog site using WordPress and sticked to that since then.

In the last 6 years, the technology has evolved a lot but the simplicity and flexibility of WordPress remained intact. Tried various themes, plugins and widgets on my site and their usefulness increased over time. Interconnecting various social and viral tools like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Picasaweb helped transcend content from one tool to the other. In the midst of all these, my personal blog site evolved as my primary writing platform and rest of the tools became a way to spread the content that is on this site.

At this juncture, I must thank all the regular visitors of my site and readers who encourage me very often with their positive mails and comments. The last few years saw a dip on the number of posts I write, but recently I resolved to get back on track. You can see the trend changing in the last few months.

 

Switchover to Android

26 Dec

For more than two years, I have been using Blackberry smartphone for my dialing and mail needs. The service is awesome especially for my email needs, but the charges I am paying for the relatively monopoly service are very high by today’s standards. Also, the handsets and the OS are relatively constrained and I am not using the full potential of the spare network bandwidth I have at home and at work.

Given this situation, I am compelled to make a switchover. Going by the choices in the market, there is no better option than Android based smartphones. I really like the Apple phones and their OS, but the feeling of lock-in always haunts me. So I decided to go with Android.

I bought a HTC Wildfire S, the entry level smartphone that should take care of my primarily email and social networking needs. Played with it for the last few hours and configured my email accounts, Google utilities, facebook and twitter on the phone. Being new to capacitive touch screen, I am having a few challenges typing my emails, but the adoption curve seems to be steep enough so far. Currently using this phone with my second cell phone connection, still leaving the contacts on the Blackberry with my primary carrier. Will make a switchover of the phones during next weekend.

Haven’t put in additional memory on the phone yet, want to test it with the basic memory for a few days. Hence haven’t downloaded many apps yet. Using the default ones that come with the Gingerbread (2.3.3) installation on the phone.

Will post more updates after I play with the phone for a while.

Upgrade to WordPress 3.3

13 Dec

WordPress announced their new version,  WordPress 3.3 (codename Sonny), a few hours ago. I upgraded my blog software to WordPress 3.3. This version presents a good amount of niceties to the admin users of the blog software.

  • Pointer Tips
  • Media Drag/Drop Uploader
  • Better Navigation Menus
  • Revamped Help

The Dashboard of WordPress is improving with every release. I got so used to some of the recent convenience features that I feel handicapped if I am administering other blogs with earlier releases of the software.

I may take till the next weekend to explore all the new features fully. As of now, the upgrade looks rock solid and nice.

There is a recent update to the theme that I use, Graphene. I updated that software too (to 1.5.6) and am a bit surprised by the absence of articles in the frontpage. A quick browse of the new configurations suggested that there is a “Front Page Options” section that enables me to select the list of categories that should be presented on the front page. Disabled that list and I am back to my original layout of the theme.

 

 

Dennis Ritchie

14 Oct

For close to two and half decades of my programming life, the name Dennis Ritchie has become a synonym for simplicity, elegance, portability and efficiency.

My love for the C language started very casually and grew with time. Having been exposed to other programming languages like BASIC, Fortran and Pascal, it took me two full days to learn the syntax of the C language. But it took me several years to understand and effectively use the semantics of various aspects of the language. Once I started learning about the early C++ interpreters on Unix language and how object oriented semantics are implemented in C language (using compilers and preprocessors together), my love for the language and its innovators kept on increasing.

The journey with the Unix operating system became more of a life than love itself. Each variant or derivative of Unix I ever worked with, including HP-UX, SCO, UCB, Magnix, Linux and Solaris in particular, led to immense passion and respect towards the fundamentals behind Unix – all the qualities I attributed to Dennis in the first sentence above. These qualities are the reason why the applications and appliances built using the core and its paradigms touch us day in and day out, directly or indirectly. (For more on these qualities, read The Practice of Programming – here and here.)

Even though Dennis is no more today, his impact will still be felt for decades to come.

Quoting Dave Tong (@davetong) on twitter:

If Steve Jobs changed the world then Dennis Ritchie created it.

All I can say is a big thank you to Dennis Ritchie, for his silent yet powerful life. It changed our lives. RIP.

Swithced to SEO Friendly Permalinks

23 Aug

Finally, I switched to SEO Friendly Permalinks (Pretty Permalinks) on my personal blog hosted using WordPress. For quite some time, I had this idea in mind but I usually preferred the short URLs (that come by default) with WordPress, so that I can share them with ease in multiple other forums. Now there are several URL shortening services around and the length of the URL is not a big inhibitor anymore while sharing the URLs. After I saw the way Google+ can enumerate a given link into the status post, I felt that using short permalinks is no longer a big requirement for social sharing. Once the content and the permalink are embedded into the status update in Google Plus (I am sure others will follow the suit very soon), the update’s readability is never impacted by long URLs. The switch happened last week and now I am giving permalinks only in the “long” SEO friendly format.

 

 

FireFox upgraded to 6.0 and Tab Groups

18 Aug

Upgraded my desktop’s Firefox to version 6.0 today. The most notable feature I used is Panorama (a.k.a tab groups) and I started configuring it right away. After initial customization, my home profile looked like this:

Firefox Tab Groups
Firefox Tab Groups

I felt that the tab groups are very much like the workspaces on GNOME Desktop. Simple one click switchover. I also liked the way the tab groups can be named and the favicons of the tabs are highlighted.

Here are the key advantages of Tab Groups I could see

  • Avoid Tab/Window clutter
  • Avoid interruptions from tabs that are not critical for now
  • Easy switch over to other tab groups
  • Ease of linking a tab to a tab group
  • Preserving the tab groups across restarts

If you want to know how to use tabgroups, read here.

Upgraded to WordPress 3.2

11 Jul

Upgraded my personal blog software to WordPress 3.2. The upgrade process is fast and simple, few seconds using the upgrade from the dashboard. Once the upgrade is done, the dashboard looks stunning – compact and crisp. Also, it is easy to figure out the current location on the left-side column in the dashboard, making the navigation very intuitive. Once the menu is collapsed (to icons level)on the left-side, there is ample real estate to do things in the dashboard.

I haven’t used the new Twenty Eleven theme, but my current theme looks decent enough with the new release. Looks like the PHP4 support is removed. I am already on PHP5.