Microsoft Interops Day

Well, well, well... I committed the crime. An open source developer attending a Microsoft event is definitely a crime. But then they promised it was going to be an event for PHP development on Windows. I took the bait, hook, line and sinker. Damn!!

The interoperability day turned out to be a cheap marketing gimmick, showcasing what you can do with IIS and Silverlight. This is a session by session breakup of what the Microsoft guys showed us:

Session 1:
Promised : Build an end-to-end, authentication and authorization model for your existing PHP application in less than 30 mins.

Delivered : An existing PHP application was taken, authentication provided by removing anonymous access from the root directory, and authorization provided by adding a login page. Quite a good demonstration , I would admit. With a few clicks of mouse, we could achieve something which takes a few lines of code.

My Take : To a hand coder like me, who needs to have control on all the stuff going around me, I don't think I will ever use this stuff.

Session 2:
Promised : Access your data exposed from your PHP app, through a RESTful service interface.

Delivered : This is where I dozed off. The demo was to show how you can easily configure a webservice for a SQL Server DB, plugin your CS code to harvest this code and show it through your browser.

My Take : Now, I may be snoring while they showed how the PHP application comes into the picture, but I have no memory of any PHP code being shown in this session actually. It was all about how to use standard plug n play snippets in Visual Studio, ADO.NET and SQL Server.

Session 3:
Promised : Configuring Windows to run your PHP applications.

Delivered : They showed us some so-called cool GUI configuration techniques for porting .htaccess configurations.

My Take : Now why would I do that? When I have a single .htaccess file to control all my apache configuration, why would I monkey around with the superfluous click-and-you-are-done controls in IIS? And the best part of the presentation was that the guy showing this all leads the PHP UG in Bangalore. What a sham!

Session 4:
Promised : Discover the web designer in you, to build pure CSS based PHP websites.

Delivered : A couple of CSS tips and tricks downloaded from the net. And a huge demo of how Silverlight can Light up your web apps.

My Take : No discussion what-so-ever for using CSS for PHP templates!! Cummon!! Atleast stick to what was promised in your mailer. But then MS is never known to stick to its promises, is it?

Overall, I think that if they had called us in for a demo of what MS is doing for the Web Developers, then I would have definitely loved the sessions. I have never worked on MS stuff for web apps development and I would have loved to have a kick start. But I went there with a differend picture in mind, and was deeply disappointed by the way in which the MS guys used the name of PHP for promoting their products.

N.B. I am currently working on AWS using Python. I find it a compelling cloud computing platform and will be starting a series of posts on it. Anyone who loves cloud computing, hold on to your keyboards!! ;)

Blogadda looses my data!!

Dear Blogger Friend,

Thank you for visiting BlogAdda.com and submitting your blog.

We had an issue with our host yesterday due to which information about your blog was inadvertently affected. Your blog URL is in the records and you might have to update the rest of the information.

Kindly login at BlogAdda (http://www.blogadda.com/login

) and click on 'My Account' link on the top. You'll see the title of your blog linked. Clicking the title will expand into a few options and you can click on 'Manage' to update details of your blog.

Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and we would appreciate if you can update the blog details asap.

We would like to assure you that we take utmost care of the data and this would not happen again. We thank you for your co-operation.

Regards
Administration Team
BlogAdda.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/blogadda
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/blogadda

What happenes when you get such a mail? I get pissed off. Within a minute of getting this mail, I shot back my reply:

No need to be sorry!! I have got tonnes of work other than to re-enter my blog details on your stupid servers which can't even store this tiny winy bit of information properly.

I am logging out of blogadda. I will make sure no one in my friendlist joins or advises anyone to join such a site which doesn't value its user's data.

I know blogadda is a free blog aggregator service and they have no responsibility what-so-ever for my data. But the question remains... how the hell can they manage to loose it?

There are many ways to loose data:

1. Hacking : Someone hacked into their database and snooped off with the data. In that case I my email ID is in their hands and at the very least, I can expect to get thousands of spam emails which may or maynot have adware and malwares attached to them.
2. Backup failure: Some bozo missed out taping my data. If they have a backup policy. Which I doubt hey have.
3. Natural Disaster: The data centre was flooded and thus my data was lost.
4. Terrorist attack: The black masked terrorists came and fled off with the tapes of my data. They also deleted my entries from the database. On the second thoughts, is my second name Bush? Definitely not.

After going through all such possibilities, all I can say is that I am mesmerised by this kinda act of terrorism on my individuality. Damn it!

A Brief History of JavaScript : Part I

"Javascript is not Java", it is the common phrase we always read whenever we read any book on JavaScript. But then why keep similar names? Its like saying the Red Indians are not from India. Huh!

Before we get into the debates about the mistakes driven by the marketing at Sun Microsystems and Netscape, which indeed has plagued web designers for years and would do so for years to come, lets have a look at the twisted history of JavaScript.

Back in the 1990s, the web was dominated by static websites.

The first graphical web browser , Mosaic, was launched by in December 1995 by NCSA. Its main achievement was that it was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window. Though the web pages still remained static but more color could be added to them.

This small advancement in the rendering of the web pages led to the frantic rush in development and selling of advanced browsers. People wanted the guys who made Mosaic to create proprietary browsers for them.

Sensing the opportunity, one of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreessen, founded the company Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. To resolve legal issues with NCSA, the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator. The Netscape browser improved on Mosaic's usability and reliability - as well as boasting the then-impressive feature of being able to display pages as they loaded.

Within a year or so, Netscape was the browser of choice for the Internet users. It had almost 90% user base covered. But then entered Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0, which was bundled free of cost with the Windows OS. This started, what is called, the first browser war. Both the companies, in a desire to outdo each other, started implementing more and more features to their browsers.

But still the web pages were static. Netscape decided to put user interactivity to the web pages.

They hired Brendan Eich to develop a scripting language that could interface with the server-side components. Tasked with this, Eich eventually decided that a loosely-typed scripting language suited the environment and audience, namely the few thousand web designers and developers who needed to be able to tie into page elements (such as forms, or frames, or images) without a bytecode compiler or knowledge of object-oriented software design.

Thus "LiveScript" was born. The name was chosen to reflect its dynamic nature. It was released with Navigator 2.0 but was quickly (before the end of Navigator 2.0 beta cycle) renamed to JavaScript.

Back after a long time...

Well... well... well... look who is back!!

Anyways, there are no readers to complain. So no apologies offered. Anyways, now to the main topic of today's post.

I am converting this blog to the chronicle of my quest for the Semantic Web.

The posts now will be related to Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) and various tools required to build a POC on my previous hypothesis, PHP, Javascript, MySql, CSS and Ajax.

Hope the world doesn't come apart before I complete my POC (What with the 2012 prophecy, you never know what's coming).

WEB 3.0 : The new frontier

I am an avid googler and swear by the Wikipedia, but a few days ago I was let down big time by the Google. I was to go to Ooty and was searching for suitable accommodation over there. Can you believe google gave me some 8470 results, out of which I read the first 20 but still couldn't get what I wanted.

Anyways, I decided that these kinda queries should be answered in person and no google should be given the authority to dictate the beds in which I sleep in. However, all the while I was driving to Ooty, one thought kept troubling me. Why can't someone dig all the wealth of information in the blogs and user reviews out there and provide me with a simple choice of no more than 10 hotels/homestays each in a different price range and with the maximum number of favorable reviews in their range?

This question is the ultimate frontier for Internet searching. Providing relevant search results have been the nightmare for all the search algorithm writers for over two decades now. Since the birth of the Internet, people have been collecting data on the cloud. How nice it would be to go through this huge amount of data and come back with the most relevant piece of information.

All this and some more spiked me to do some more googling on such searching and voila! I came up with a new jargon "WEB 3.0". Well, not actually new, I had heard a lot about semantic and vertical searching and have dirtied my hands trying web page - scraping but had never given a serious thought to this so called "natural language searching".

Now, lets take the most basic question : What is, or rather will be, WEB 3.0? Everybody has got his own opinion about what it will be, I also have mine. For me, WEB 3.0 will be a paradigm shift from what we know of the Internet as of today. I mean, 10 years down the line there won't be any website as we see today. What will be is a huge repository of data, which will be essentially user and community generated and we will be able to access the data in whatever format we like and we won't need a conventional computer to do that (anyways PCs will have shrunk to the size of a laser device mounted on our ears which can project images on any surface or play sounds from their ear buds). This data will be rendered in whatever format we like using our previous preferences and could be changed whenever we want to. Hmmm! Quite futuristic huh. Wait for another 10 years sweetheart.

But before we leap 10 years in the time warp, lets think if we can do anything about what we have here today. Maybe, maybe not. Lets break this huge insurmountable problem into somewhat smaller and manageable issues. As we know most of the searches in future will be like :

a. I want to go to a happy place.
b. I would like to read a sad, romantic story.
c. I would like to have delicious, Chinese, home cooked food.

Now all these questions today are answered by searching for keywords from the existing pages. However, we are talking about a search in which the search engine crawls all through the blogs and forums and other community sites and get the reactions of people for the various options possible and then show the results. Whew! That's a huge requirement in itself. Now let us break this into a further smaller problems.

The biggest issue here is how does the search engine understand the emotions portrayed by the web page? Most of the searches can be made easy if the pages can be ranked according to their EQ. To answer this let me ask another question: How do we gauge the emotional state of something we read? Simple! By looking at the keywords which our parents and teachers taught us to identify with certain emotions. Similarly if we keep a data base where in the search engine can refer to and find out the number of sad or happy keywords, then it can gauge the overall emotional state of the page.

So one problem solved. Similarly I will try to tackle different issues as and when I get time and in the end we will have the model of a basic WEB 3.0 search engine.

Oracle Buys Sun

Finally the beleaguered Sun Microsystems has got a suitor. Oracle Corp. has inked a deal to buy struggling server vendor Sun Microsystems for $9.50 per share, representing a 42.0% premium to Sun's closing price of $6.69 on Friday afternoon. This deal is worth $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

What does it mean to us as a consumer? Now Oracle will own Sun's Solaris operating system, Java programming language, and servers and storage hardware systems businesses. Integrating its enterprise software products with now added server and Solaris OS it can provide a off-the-shelf ready-to-use product which you can buy, bring to your office, plugin to your network and voila! you are all set to start your applications on your server. These are exciting propositions. Oracle will be the only company with products like this, though IBM has its products on the same lines but the software products of Oracle have a greater demand.

Oracle is predicting that it will generate $2.0 billion in profits for Sun two years after signing the deal, which is expected to be sealed this summer. So it seems to be a very exciting buy after all. Looks like Larry Ellison is going to enhance his riches manifolds. He has taken a bold decision and only time will tell whether it is going to pay.

The Pirate Bay is pirated

Hmmmm... so a Napster happened to the Pirate Bay, though in a new country and by a new Judge. The defendants Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom were all sentenced to one year in jail each and a fine to the tune of $3,620,000 is to be paid by them to the prosecutors. The plaintiffs had demanded over 100 million Crowns as damages!!


Now, coming back to the issue of Piracy, I really don't take sides. I am of the notion that every man who works hard has a right to his creation and sell it at a price he deems to be right. But what about the obscene amounts these entertainment industry guys charge us. Why should I pay for the 20 millions some jackass named Brad Pitt charges these studios? Or for that matter the 20 Crores Akshay Kumar makes for one single movie. Am I as a spectator at fault if I can't shell out the Rs 250 my local friendly PVR charges me for one show? Why won't I go for a cheaper(or shud I say free) version on the Pirate bay, Mininova, Demonoid or Torrentbox? Only if the shows were at a reasonable rate like Rs 50 or perhaps lower than that I would obviously go and watch the movie on a 75 mm screen and not on my measly 17" PC Screen.

Lets take a hypothetical scenario : Movies are available for 1$ each for download from the net, using the same technologies. Will you then go for a pirated version? I won't!! The cost of any ones conscience is always more than a dollar. This is simple economics and I don't know why these guys don't understand this. Why bleed billions of Dollars to new technologies when you can actually earn millions from it? Instead of being steadfast on not lowering the prices, these studio bosses should acknowledge the advent of technologies and smartasses who use them (or abuse them depending on which side you are on) and understand the new demand and supply conditions. Gone are the days when you can only watch new movies in the theater or wait it to be at least 3-4 months older so that your favorite TV channel broadcasts it. With the faster than light broadband speeds the movies are passed on the net even before you can properly spell the cast's names.

The studio bosses should go in for differential pricing, the first three days should be at a premium of not more than $10. Then after the first weekend the prices should come down to $1. They don't have to maintain any servers or the huge bandwidth required by using the P2P distribution systems. All they need to do is to give a authenticated torrent tracker file for a dollar. And they also save money on printing discs and transportation. I sincerely believe this would be a highly profitable model.

And if they don't heed to it then no Pirate Bay can save them. Everyday the technology and browsing speed is increasing in scope. We will have hundreds of new sites giving away these so-called copyrighted stuff for free on the net and they can't sue everyone. Already there are sites which promise IP cloaking for P2P connections. And surprise surprise... Pirate Bay is still up and running. Looks like they are not ruffled. They have safely moved their servers to Netherlands!!

Someone needs to tell them to take a long hard thought at this age old saying "Lets make friends and not enemies".