Archis's Blog

Sometimes it amazes me how numbers can be deceiving. In the scientific world, it’s not new to see heated debates about the choice of appropriate metrics. On the larger scale though, the scientific world, rather than expressing opinions, chooses to express facts and numbers, so that everyone can apply his own metrics.

During one of my experiments out here, I had to make some webservice tests (I’m going to write about the power of SOAP webservices soon – that doesn’t mean I oppose REST).I began doing what any programmer would do before undertaking a new mission in largely unexplored terrotory – reconnaissance. I went around hunting for some case studies and experiences others have had with using ASP.Net. The airdeccan site (which recently moved to ASP.Net) is still pissing me off enough so that I’m giving ASP.Net a -1 due to them.

Just yesterday evening, we had a major discussion on how even most of us at Microsoft have no clue what Microsoft is upto. We find out more about our own top-secret projects on slashdot, than we find out internally. Many interesting product releases are as much a surprise to us internally as they are to others outside.

Having lived in the free-software atmosphere for a long time, I had brainwashed myself into thinking that “Servers => Linux” and “Desktops => Windows”. However, during my hunting expeditions I came upon a case study which was a bit too difficult for me to believe. Especially since I’ve been researching for a major blog entry about how Google uses certain loosely connected, low-reliability, redundant customized systems to handle all those heavy loads of data. I’ll still post that blog entry soon (once I can get some confirmation on a few claims).

Here’s three facts I found that were most astonishing. Read each word carefully to actually get the thrust of the implications:

1. Myspace handles more page views than _all_ of the _msn_ and _google_ sites _combined_. They have approx 260,000 new users registering daily. If you’re not a techie, then take it from me (a self-declared techie), that’s a LOT of traffic. Personally, I never thought much of MySpace to begin with, until I read this. They serve 1.5 billion pages per day.

2. They use ASP.Net to do all this. Oh sure, ASP.Net can run on many platforms through Mono.

3. Wait for it…….. it all runs on Windows Servers! The largest website in the world, having more hits than MSN and Google put together, runs on Windows Server 2003. The database is Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The webserver is IIS 6.0.

I’ve gotta admit, I really need to show some more faith in what my company does in the future….

I agree that there is always the glass is half full/half empty scenario in such cases. That’s why as a scientist, I belive in saying “the glass contains 100 ml of water”. I haven’t drawn any conclusions here. I have only presented facts. Some might claim that more servers run LAMP and one case study doesn’t prove anything. Some will say that one major website provides better proof than all the smaller sites put together. Either way, I encourage you to interpret this any way you want. But whatever the conclusion, I argue that this piece of information itself is very important. And I think that in the spirit of “information wants to be free”, everyone must be at least made aware of this information and allowed to make their own decisions without influence or bias.

Here are links from where I got these facts. And you are totally free to question the validity of the information presented there as well. I have taken it in good faith.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/25/441074.aspx

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082924,00.asp

It may not be proof, but this at least provides enough evidence to consider the _possibility_ that out-of-the-box precompiled, non-impressive easy-installation software without a lot of customized tweaking and recompiling by hot-shot “hackers”, _might_just_ be a compelling platform to think of when developing websites.

I purposely waited till I used Vista for at least 3 months before commenting on this issue. I just don’t see what all the fuss is about? I’m comfortably running all my apps on Vista without the UAC prompt coming up once! Maybe it’s because Microsoft IT services gives me all Vista-compatible software, but even otherwise, I can run my older stuff in a compatibility mode.

The only UAC prompts I deal with during the course of my day are, the powershell which I need for my project’s build automation, and Visual Studio, which needs to access regasm.

I think that one of the problems Microsoft is facing with Vista is the bad habits it gave users with the previous versions of Windows. For example, many users keep installing/uninstalling a lot of junk freeware/shareware and complain of the UAC prompts. Even on Linux, if you were attempting to install/remove a bunch of RPMs or DEBs, you’d find yourself ‘su’ing to root for each command.

I frequently need to sudo on my Linux box to reach my conf files and maintain my applications, but it was just a part of life. I guess with Windows, people just expect stuff to work and maybe Microsoft pushed that expectation too far.

However, all hope isn’t lost for end-users. There are rumours about Vienna that all unmanaged and unsigned code will be sandboxed by default – no exceptions. I think Vista is an intermediary step to get used to the fact that from now on, Windows will be an uncompromising OS of the 21st century. No more of that 1980′s mushy-mushy OS that tried to play nicely with everyone. And UAC is just the beginning – because it’s a “yes/no” dialog. Possibly, the next version of Windows is going to give a hands-down “NO!” to any software that tries to misbehave, regardless of what the user feels about it.

The fact that you’re seeing a lot of UAC prompts doesn’t really reflect on Vista’s own irritating nature – even Linux would do that if each program you ran needed to write to /etc. It just reflects on how bad and sloppy programmers had gotten over the years. And Microsoft is definately to blame; not for encouraging this tendency, but for not actively discouraging it. Hopefully as more and more people learn to live with Vista, you should see a cleaner and more disciplined approach to security being followed by developers too.

Another one of those ISSC-alumni-attractors. But trust me – this one is written in good faith. All TY’s should check this out – stuff I learnt the hard way.

There are two things you must do to evaluate what you’re getting yourself into. And you have to rigorously implement these methods at any cost.

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it always is: If you find people making big claims, run out. If you haven’t heard a single bad thing about a college, then trust me – it’s horrible.

I call it the ‘motorbike theory’. A “cool dude” in class look at big ads and big claims and buys a motorbike. The bike turns out to be a worthless piece of junk. Being a “cool dude”, the guy justifies it and praises it to make up for his internal embarassment. Looking at all those praises, another hot-shot goes out and makes the same mistake, against all common sense. Very soon, you have a critical mass of embarassed idiots with big egos and you don’t hear a single bad thing about the bike – because even a single bad thing could mean the loss of their “coolness”.

However, if someone buys a decent enough bike and it’s got flaws, he’s very open about them, and complains that next time he’ll buy a better one.

This theory applies to all aspects of our lives, and definately to colleges. If you find someone not having a single bad thing to say about their college, you can bet your career that the college sucks!

I am myself guilty of having following the motorbike theory when I went to ISSC in the first place. At least I have the guts to admit my mistake and prevent others from repeating it.

2. Talk to seniors: To confirm or reject the motorbike theory, you have to talk to seniors. Go to that institute. Talk to teachers. Talk to students. Make sure you fit there well. It’s not always about looking at how the teachers or students of that institute themselves are. It’s more about figuring out whether you would be happy there.

This is one critical step people miss out on. Take our own college, for example. People from Fergusson’s undergrad find themselves very comfortable in PG. Outsiders find it difficult to adapt to the culture. There’s no regular homework, there’s no regular checking of notebooks, and one day out of nowhere you land up in the exams. For someone from a college that enforses regular checking of notebooks, they just don’t know when the semester ended.

For me personally though, it was awesome! I didn’t fit well in a Thomas-Finney atmosphere of the university. I could schedule my own studies according to my speed. And I could handle the syllabus quite well. So at FC, I participated in a bunch of contests and won. In ISSC, I was nothing – just another Thomas/Finney solver.

But this is not always the best choice for everyone. If you’re not used to scheduling your work appropriately, if you’re not used to working under pressure, and if you’re not used to being independent and not having a constant nagging HoD on your heads to decide every single thing for you, Fergusson may turn out to be a horrid place for you, and you might actually be successful at the ISSC.

So long as you keep these two things in mind, you should find yourself in a good position. As to whether you’d want to join the industry and work for a couple of years, before going in for a PG, that’s a good option too. During the late 80′s and early 90′s, there have been people from BCS who’ve had big careers even without a PG degree. Its all about value for money.

Are you looking for opportunities where all that PG education is really needed? Are you looking at companies who demand a PG degree? If you don’t get the right value for the amount of time/money spent in PG, don’t go for it. It would end up frustrating you.

The easiest choice for me was Fergusson was simply because it was an extreme-liberal atmosphere. So if you wanted, you could be a nerd studying day and night. If you wanted, you could be someone who watches a movie till 3:00am on the night before a major exam. If you wanted you could bunk. At the end of the day, freedom is the easiest choice amongst all others. Because you can do what you want. A forced atmosphere where everyone _has_ to party on the night before exams, is horrible. And a forced atmosphere where everyone has to constantly whine and be all nerdy and talk about thomas-finney all day long, it’s equally horrible.

“Choose wisely, and it will bring you life”

Microsoft occasionally has interesting contests and competitions on campus to keep us motivated and to come up with reasons to give out T-shirts, Pizza, and prizes.

Right now, the currently ongoing contest is called Build 24. It began yesterday at high noon and will go on till noon today.

During this contest, we have to come up with as many crazy whacky ideas, concepts, prototypes, demos, etc. that we can. There’s a lot of teams participating, and loads of action going on. The manager sitting in the cabin opposite mine is working hard as I and my partner take a break. I’m watching a movie while he’s taking a nap.

I’ll post how it goes here. Whatever the case, it’s damn exciting and exhiliarating. The judges panel is made up of elite people – Srini being amongst them.

I have quite a few whacky ideas of my own, but not sure if I’ve got enough time to prototype them all. Since my job is to build rapid prototypes as fast as possible, it’s going to be an embarrassment if I can’t deliver at least two prototypes. If Peri had been the organiser, he’d have expected a lot more than that.

One of them is half done. But hit a technical snag. The other is awesome in design, but not sure if I’ll get the time to investigate everything before prototyping it.

Ok, if you\’ve been thinking why everything\’s called Live with everything so dead, you\’ve got something coming. Check out Ms Dewey (and feel free to \”check her out\” too), and you\’ll know just how Live things are. MS Dewey, combined with natural-language search (which is mind-boggling compared to Google – more on this below), brings a new meaning to how you do things on the internet. It would take me a lot to explain her and would be a lot boring compared to you simply visiting http://www.msdewey.com and checking her out yourself.

And coming to intelligent natural-language search, I\’ve just got a simple example for you. Visit Live and Google, and search for the phrase \”how many states are in America?\”. Check out the results yourself – I won\’t need to explain. Instead of attempting to explain what would happen, I decided to add a side-by-side comparison screenshot to this blog. Just look at the image above, so you won\’t waste time reading about it.

It seems Yahoo reduced the size of the photograph and thereby it\’s clarity. But it\’s really simple to do it yourself. In case you\’re too tired to do it yourself, here\’s to quick links to the results: Live Results and Google Results.

Ok, if you\’ve been thinking why everything\’s called Live with everything so dead, you\’ve got something coming. Check out Ms Dewey (and feel free to \”check her out\” too), and you\’ll know just how Live things are. MS Dewey, combined with natural-language search (which is mind-boggling compared to Google – more on this below), brings a new meaning to how you do things on the internet. It would take me a lot to explain her and would be a lot boring compared to you simply visiting http://www.msdewey.com and checking her out yourself.

And coming to intelligent natural-language search, I\’ve just got a simple example for you. Visit Live and Google, and search for the phrase \”how many states are in America?\”. Check out the results yourself – I won\’t need to explain. Instead of attempting to explain what would happen, I decided to add a side-by-side comparison screenshot to this blog. Just look at the image above, so you won\’t waste time reading about it.

It seems Yahoo reduced the size of the photograph and thereby it\’s clarity. But it\’s really simple to do it yourself. In case you\’re too tired to do it yourself, here\’s to quick links to the results: Live Results and Google Results.

You know how one of those subtle things can just justify one technology over the other? Well, this was the breakeven point for me. From this specific point onwards, my opinion has tipped in favour of .Net as compared to Java.

I was writing a utility to cache RSS feeds. Well, sometimes a user will clean your IE cache, and I wanted my program to use IE’s own cache in the backend so that if the user ever visited my pages, he’d cache them for me already.

So I went poking around Wininet and wrote a bunch of COM Interop and P/Invoke crap, and complex threading logic and stuff. I downloaded the resources, and then added them to the IE cache, and stuff.

Later I found out that anything in .Net does that for you already. For example, just use a PictureBox.Load(String URI) method twice and the second time, it’ll be pulled from your IE cache! Shit! That’s awesome! I feel like a stupid idiot having wasted so much time writing all that asynchronous crap logic. So basically, next time users visit that same page in IE, it’ll already be cached. And that too automatically. All images you load through picturebox.load are automotically cached in IE.

Essentially, any web-related stuff through the .Net framework gets automatic stuff done in the background – caching, resolution, redirection, etc. This is freakin idiotic! I’m gonna be out of my job if this continues!

It’s just too much information. It is now more than an year and a half since Episode 3 was released and I was still trying to emotionally come to terms with the fact that Star Wars is now OVER! And finally last night, it just dawned upon me. It’s broken my heart! It is the most depressing thing in the world!

I mean it’s Star Wars! It’s the Jedi! How can it all be over? There’s got to be something. Naturally, one cannot expect a storyline as strong as the one that currently exists. It hands-down beats any storyline ever. Matrix and all is fine, but the stories are just crap. SW has always been about the strong story, characters, decisions, dilemmas, etc. In short, it’s a modern day Mahabharat. Yes – the only thing comparable in complexity, portrayal of human emotions, politics, and depicting the very fine intricate connections we all share in the universe is Mahabharat.

It’s always been my dream, and I’ve been blogging about this for a long time, to see Mahabharat made in the Star Wars style. Now now, before you begin telling me how Mahabharat should be done in an original style, I meant Star Wars style in the sense of the zeal and the ambitiousness.

George Lucas was a complete adamant dude when it came to things he wanted to see on screen. That’s another thing which impresses me with Ben Hur. I don’t like compromises. I want directors to think of movies as a part of their soul – not all the formula crap by the likes of Karan Johar. While it’s entertaining, once in a while, one needs a movie that was made for the sake of it – for the sake of expressing a concept. Afterall, that’s what art is all about.

And there doesn’t exist a story other than Mahabharat that can really give SW a run for it’s money. A story where characters are deeply and intricately connected, in their actions, decisions, experiences, and points of view (the most important lesson of SW – “Truth depends greatly on our own point of view”). And I feel we owe it to the art of storytelling, to the history and heritage of our nation, to really bring this story to life – not the stupid idiotic battles shown in the Doordarshan version, but in real grand manner. Without compromises. Without excuses. Good actors, great directors, and awesome effects.

Come on. Anyone up for it? The reason that India doesn’t have as much money is stupid. So many people donate so much gold every year to Mandirs. And they claim love for heritage. If they could only pool a part of that gold and all the monetary donations to make a movie or a series of movies! A complete Saga. How cool would that be?

If within 10 years of the SW original triology, George Lucas with a story that he concocted within his lifetime, could influence a large part of the European population to actually claim that they follow the Jedi religion in the census, imagine what it could do with a story that has withstood the imagination of hundreds of generations. Instead of all those boring lectures and all that shit teenagers in India have to face from old guys speaking sleepishly on television advising them of their heritage, if this were to be made, it would change the world!

Orkut has a lot of characters. And some of them are funny as hell. We have a psychological tendency to interpret unknown words that we hear based on the context of our frequent activities.

I saw an orkut thread asking, “Who is this Cypher DS?” and that too in the Batman community (I’m a big fan). I thought must be some new cyber-villian (“holy microprocessor batman!”), so I investigated a bit further. The guy was asking who this “Cypher DS” is who commissioned the Clone Army. He thought it was Qui-Gon himself.

Of all the misinterpretations of words, this one tops them all. It’s an indication that teens are slowly speaking the cyber-lingo. I remember when I first saw the movie, I heard “Saffron Dias”.

I always knew I wasn’t exactly “normal”, but just how far out of sync I was with the rest of humanity is something I realised only recently.

I’ve never lived with room mates yet, and never ones who were not from Microsoft. But for the very first time, I’m realising just what it means to be human.

My roommates probably feel I’m crazy, because they generally treat me like a mass-murderer. They’re very cautious around me, and very quiet when I’m around (which is very rare). I can understand why they would feel so too.

They leave for work at 10am sharp and are back home at 9pm sharp (I leave at noon and return after midnight – of the next day). They eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at strict times (I don’t know which is which). Wash their clothes regularly (I just go out and buy clothes every time I run out of laundry).

And finally, I tend to turn to all the cartoon network and disney channels, which I realised isn’t what “grown men” do. That’s where we generally have our issues. They keep putting on some Hindi movies or some wierdo hindi songs which I don’t particularly care for. I generally keep turning channels which are silly according to them.

All in all it’s a disaster. I’ll soon be moving into a single-occupancy room. If you know of any place, do recommend it to me. I prefer staying the way I am and have no intention of being normal – because I can do things which normal people cannot and I take pride in that.