Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

My neice got the “Student Of The Month” award!

Karan puts it into words what I have been struggling with for a long time. Amen to that.

My friends at UCIL got interviewed and published on Sunday in Hindustan Times.

I’ve been associated with them for over 4 years now. My first decent job (and the second in total) was at the cybercafe UCIL’s CEO Anuj and his elder brother Amit had started way back in ’99. We were the first cybercafe in Chandigarh on a leased line and had a really well-lighted 2500+ sq. ft. area with 27 computers. That is how I got to know them and became friends. Working with them then and each single interaction with them since has been a wonderful experience; never have I come back not having learnt something new.

When they opened UCIL after closing down LOGIN (that’s the name of the cybercafe), I knew they would go places. They have just ended up surprising even the expectant by their incredible fast pace of growth. And the future is only brighter.

Wish you all the best guys!

According to C|Net, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata just bought a 96-processor XD1 supercomputer (datasheet) from Cray. The specifications page does’t list a 96-processor unit but from the looks of it, it should be around 500 Gflops. That makes me wonder why they didn’t purchase a supercomputer from C-DAC which is making and selling supercomputers all over the globe much cheaper comparatively. I am disappointed.

I have upgraded to KDE 3.3 desktop environment. It looks so much better than KDE 3.1 that came as default with WBEL that I was using only a few minutes ago. It’s a nice feeling.

Time to explore!

IBM has broken the supercomputing speed record with it’s Blue Gene/L prototype producing 36 teraflops compared to NEC’s Earth Simulator which chugs away at 35.86 teraflops. Holy!

Compare that to India’s 1 teraflop Param Padma which is scalable to 16 teraflops. C-DAC has been offering these on a build-to-order basis too. Quite cheap by international standards.

But 36 teraflops is something. And the IBM prototype is just 1/8 size of the real Blue Gene/L!

I finally caught up with and am now officially current on all my news feeds.
RSS rules.

FlashBlog is a Weblog made in Flash/Php/MySQL. It is an Open Source application and even the Flash source (FLA files) are available. Though in beta, it already does:

• Front End in Flash
• Back End Php/MySQL
• Categories
• Search
• WYSIWYG Publisher
• Multi-users
• Multi-author
• “Limitless” vertical stage
• Function buttons: back/ahead

Not a big fan of Flash applications but this looks delicious.

Produced by Motion4Graphics.com. Via Sephiroth.it.

That’s Jacob Nielsen speaking in his latest Alertbox. It is an excellent article where he talks about how the user experience is so governed by ‘accepted norms’ that a non-standard design implementation will only alienate your users and make them go elsewhere.

Adam Kalsey is a well respected developer in the community. So when he wrote a blog post "Why I don’t recommend Firefox", people sat up and noticed what he was talking about. So did I.

Adam makes a strong comment and justfiably so that Firefox is not ready for mass consumption yet. Those ‘average’ users who shift over are hand-held by somebody who’s more ‘in the know’. He points to the website and tries to give an idea of how an ‘average’ user would react to the copy of the home page. Very well written and very right too.

However, I also noticed that he has written this post in response to Asa Dotzler’s email asking him to put a Firefox link on his blog. He says, “I think the browser has some way to go before I’d recommend it to the general population.” But from the general feel, I got the idea that most people who visit his blog would be developers, and the home page is targeted towards that segment. I think Mozilla Foundation is targeting the developer community so that they have a reasonable technical base that can help out people in their local sphere of influence since there is no paid of free dedicated support system. But then, after the recent IE issues, I don’t think there would be many developers out there who don’t know about and don’t have Firefox installed on their computers… A link is not going to make any difference to them, is it?

Hmm… what a fine web.

Dancing With Tears In My Eyes – Ultravox
Single released 19th May 1984 from the Lament album.

Dancing with tears in my eyes,
Weeping for the memory of a life gone by.
Dancing with tears in my eyes,
Living out a memory of a love that died.

… 😐

I slept last night. It was fun.

My office sponsored an official outing for the employees by taking us all to see the Indian movie “Dhoom” in Fun Republic, a multi-plex (the only) in Chandigarh.

The movie stars Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra, John Abraham, Esha Deol and Rimi Sen. I have no idea why they say that the movie stars Esha & Rimi. They’re not even proper supporting casts but more of an eye candy with each getting their water-song dance. Anyway, if you are expecting a story or a plot, stop thinking right now. If you’re expecting performance, stop thinking right now. If you’re expecting action, stop thinking right now. If you’re expecting to see a lot of cool looking bikes, stop thinking right now. If you’re expecting some sort of logic, stop thinking right now. Actually, if you want to enjoy the movie, just stop thinking for the 2 hour something duration.

It’s funny. It’s entertaining. Just don’t try watching it again. 😉
[BTW, yes, it’s very inspired from Hollywood.]

The Age of Essays (Through Karan).
A very interesting, well researched and well written essay on essays.

I just caught it on /. that ASF has refused to implement Sender ID. They’ve written an open-letter to MARID IETF Working Group about it.

The current Microsoft Royalty-Free Sender ID Patent License Agreement terms are a barrier to any ASF project which wants to implement Sender ID. We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.

This was inevitable and will probably make other organisations with similar issues raise their voice. I suppose ASF will now become a leading voice in why Sender ID should not be implemented in larger, long-term interest of people who believe in Open-Source. When I had first read of SPF and Microsoft’s additions to it, I was impressed. The very commentary that provided me the intro also pointed out how this would conflict with certain established licenses and ideologies. It hadn’t occured to me then though that big organisations and influential voices would simply say no. Now that they have, it seems the logical thing too. I wonder how things will stand a few months down the line with Microsoft’s implementation of Sender ID coming into effect and many other organisations also following suit while many others that use ASF products don’t, not that they are technologically incompatible or anything.

Let’s see who fires the next round, at whom and how.

UPDATE: September 3 (2:06pm)
Expectedly, Microsoft‘s “Harry Katz, program manager for Microsoft Exchange, has made three points about how it (Sender ID’s license) will be interpreted in a message to a standards group of the Internet Engineering Task Force named MTA Authorization Records in DNS, or MARID, which is working on Sender ID” reports eWeek.

Has Microsoft blinked on its licensing requirements for Sender ID, making it more acceptable to the open-source community? Some open-source leaders and companies think that it has, while others vehemently disagree.

Sendmail, Inc. has released a milter for its MTA that incorporates implementation of Sender ID authentication specification for testing and that too under their own Sendmail Open Source License. Further, Dave Anderson, Sendmail’s CEO has made it clear that he has no intention to sign Microsoft’s license. eWeek quotes him, “This isn’t just for testing. I plan on going into production with no signed agreement.”

Interesting.

In his column titled I Come to Bury Sender ID, Not to Praise It, eWeek’s columnist Larry Seltzer makes numerous points on how “Microsoft’s uncompromising licensing attitudes show a blindness worthy of King Lear.” I reluctantly have to agree with him when he states his opinion on the outcome of this mess.

The rest of the SID standards process will now be a waste of time thanks to Microsoft, and the other participants will afterwards pick up the pieces and get the job done with another spec.

When one looks at the issue in light of the recent report by CipherTrust, a messaging security firm in Atlanta (Full story @ TechNewsWorld), one gets a sinking feeling that perhaps this will indeed turn out to be merely a new fad technology that delivers little. They analysed two million messages received between May and August and came to the conclusion that “spam messages were three times more likely to pass an SPF check than legitimate mail.” Ouch.

CipherTrust Research Engineer Dmitri Alperovitch told TechNewsWorld, “There was a perception out there that SPF was designed to stop spam, and it wasn’t. It was designed to authenticate the sender of a message, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Spammers aren’t circumventing this, but adopting it and adopting it at a greater rate than legitimate senders.” That is indeed the case actually. The whole Sender ID technology has come to mean “anti-spam” while in reality is nothing more than “anti-spoof”.

I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for more on this while the issue heats up more as expected.

Update: September 5 (8:15pm)
Closely following ASF, Martin Michlmayr, Debian Project Leader, has written to MARID IETF Working Group rejecting Sender ID as well.

We believe the current license and resulting encumbrances are incompatible with the DFSG, unlike other Internet standards that Debian is able to support.

Go here.
Take up the challenge.

I failed. 😉

This story on eWeek talks about banks in Japan starting the use of Fujitsu’s biometric vein-pattern recognition technology for authentication.

(It) works by shining a near-infrared light on a palm placed about four centimeters above a scanner. The vein patterns illuminated under the skin appear as dark patterns, and it is this information that becomes the basis for security applications.

Sometimes I wonder about the symbiotic nature of real science and science fiction — which drives the other, how and to what degree. The classic example to illustrate my point is Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. A fiction based on fact yet the science was extended by Chrichton so beautifully that the boundaries of what is possible, and will be possible and what is not possible and probably never be are pretty much dulled out. In about a decade or so after its publication many cool gadgets have become widespread in use. It’s fun and a welcome break to muse about such, away from the hectic life of managing clients and their projects.

Mozilla.org got a facelift today. Quite refreshing design though I was taken aback just a little when I saw Firefox being promoted over Mozilla 1.7.2 but I suppose there must be a logical reason to do so. Don’t think Firefox has become the flagship product for Mozilla Foundation yet though it appears that it is fast becoming one of the more spoken-about browsers extremely fast.

The new iMac makes me drool.

This story at C|Net broke the news to me. My first impression was, “That’s it? What’s so special about it?” as if I was expecting something radically geeky. But then, thinking about it — it is radically geeky! Minimalism is surely in and the new iMac gives the aesthetic minimalism lacking in today’s cluttered desktop environments. Too many wires Joey, too many freaking wires!

Anyway, from a person who’ll probably never buy an Apple for oh-so-many-reasons, that is enough banter. It does make me drool though.

Dan Cederholm writes a hillarious ode to the Breast Pocket, or BP. It comes with a nice graphic illustration just in case you had any doubts about what he’s talking about and lists the difference from … ahem … the 4-sides sewn version. 😉

Readers follow up with equally amusing comments.