Author: Gautham Pai

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World Wide Web

Flock – a Web 2.0 browser?

I have been trying Flock for about a month now. And I am stuck to it.

What I liked:

  1. Blogging support – I am making this blog entry from within Flock. Also there is Technorati publishing support and all that.
  2. Flickr support – you get to know if someone adds new photos and you get to see them in a neat view.
  3. Delicious support – one of my favorite features here. There is a neat sync between your local bookmarks and your delicious bookmarks. You just click on the 'star' next to the address bar and you get a popup where you indicate whether the bookmark should be posted to del.icio.us.
  4. An improved search bar – there is live Yahoo search, local search history and the usual search engine support.
  5. Performance – somehow seems better than Firefox. Dunno why? 😐 (However, see hate point 2)
  6. Web snippets – I don't use this much, but there is a snippets bar, where you can copy snippets of your interest.
  7. News – This is where you get to manage your RSS feeds. But I don't use this either, not better than Blogbridge. 🙂

What I hated:

  1. I sometimes feel they should have gone with making an extension over Firefox rather than a separate browser. Some extensions might not work in Flock. Developers have to adhere to Flock separately. This is not good.
  2. Sometimes, there is some backend process which runs for a long time and results in a 'Unresponsive script' warning. This stops the working of the browser for a while.

Overall, I strongly recommend Flock for people who use the utilities mentioned and were craving for integration of these.

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Blogged with Flock

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My Updates

Hackday @ IBM

The power of blogging was apparent. IBM had its first unofficial HackDay.

What was impressive was that the contest and the details spread through blogging and then got publicity because it was recognized by some of the biggies.

I participated. I came up with a simple and useful hack, which has been listed under the 'Best improvement' category. More details about the event can be found here.

There were calls, where participants discussed their hacks.

Thanks to all the organizers.

Awaiting the next one! 🙂

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World Wide Web

What would a semantic desktop look like?

For a moment, let's forget the question and look at a totally different question – what does your desktop look like? Stop reading this for a moment, minimize all windows and have a look at your desktop.

You would see a set of icons (files) right?

Ok, let's say you repeat this experiment sometime later, say a month from now? What would it look like? A similar set of files?

Ok, now how different is it from your current desktop?

If I am right, there is a very strong probability that your desktop reflects your current interests. If you use your computer to listen to songs, then you see some directories containing songs, may be a bunch of players, etc. And if you are a game buff, you will probably see a list of shortcuts to games.

What I am getting to is that the desktop is contextual and at any time I can somewhat determine how you use your system by just looking at your desktop. Although in terms of implementation, the desktop is just another folder, the way users use it is quite different.

Once in a while you spend time re-organizing things, moving things away from your cluttered desktop (and this happens just like in real life 🙂 ). Why do you do that? The reasons for this is not just that your desktop is cluttered, but also that your interests have changed over time.

One more petty observation. If you are in the habit of using more than one system, you will observe that the desktop reflects different things in different systems.

Ok now to the question of a semantic desktop. My idea of a semantic desktop is that of an intelligent desktop that knows what you are currently interested in, shows you what you like at the moment and silently archives things from your desktop (atleast move it away from the 'desktop') as your interests change and it sees that there are irrelevant things out there.

It might also contain information relating to the latest music if you are a music buff, or may be some game that you might be interested in playing if you are interested in games.

You might now wonder, how different it is from widgets that we use on our desktops? Well, there are some differences.

Widgets are 'floating' on top of your desktop. In other words they don't form part of your desktop and I see it like a work-around to not having support from Operating Systems (or the Desktop Environment) for a true semantic desktop.

My idea of a semantic desktop is that of a 'dynamically changing background'. The background image should also have other information embedded in it and this should be real-time. The information could be your contacts, local news, a music player, what not!

The most relevant thing I can think of right now is setting some 'start-pages' as your desktop background. Start pages could be something like Google IG or My Yahoo, My MSN or say Goowy.

Of course, we are not even close to what I see as a real semantic desktop. But I guess we are making some major advancements in this direction and the day is not far-off when I will see my information totally organized and I see the realization of 'information-on-demand'.

So to wind up, how can this happen? Being a semantic web enthusiast, I will naturally expect semantic web to solve the problem of providing data and applying views on data stores. Then there is a need for operating systems (or the desktop environment) to provide support for such an environment. For example, the synchronization interval in the case of the example above is 1 day! That is not even close to 'real-time'. The widgets that we see today should not be floating around, but should be truly embedded into the desktop and should prop up if we need to interact with it, but otherwise stay there just as a provider of information.

Now someone may say that widgets can be configured to not float around. For example, Yahoo Widgets has this option of Konspose mode or moving the widgets to a lower layer.

I however feel there are vital differences between widgets and semantic desktops.

1. I expect the widgets not to interfere with the rest of my icons. So an “Auto arrange” should arrange the icons and widgets in such a way that they don't overlap.
2. A double click on a widget should activate the widget and I should be able to interact with it. Clicking on an empty space should embed the widget back into the desktop.
3. I should be able to resize, minimize/restore widgets at will. Each widget should have a set of configurable properties that I can set through a right-click.

This clearly indicates that Widgets require more support from the Operating System (or the Desktop Environment).

Let me be optimistic and expect some support soon.

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My Updates

How much is my blog worth?


My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

Hmmm, not bad. The latest worth can be found out here.

Categories
World Wide Web

Google, Google, more Google

Google released spreadsheets recently. (Ok, now the world is not quite excited about Google releases).

But I am one of those guys who tries out anything that is thrown at us. I registered for the limited test of Google spreadsheets and tested it out today. And for the first time I felt that Google is losing its standard. They have done a good job no doubt, but it still needs a lot of work before it can be really used.

I could see some bugs and lots of usability issues. Some petty features that we see in full fledged spreadsheet applications are missing. For example, I miss the drag and populate feature where you write some numbers and then drag the pointer down from the last cell and see the rest of the cells populate automatically. I also miss the drag and move feature, wherein I can drag a cell's value and populate some other cell, there by performing an implicit cut/paste.

Am I asking for too much? I don't think so. For regular users of spreadsheets, I don't see an application like this suitable. The number of cells is far too limited (2000 cells). There are no graphs available. Lots of other important features are missing.

So now the question is who is Google targeting? I am sure Google has a definite agenda in mind. There could be 2 possibilities (may be Google is aiming for both):

1. Google is trying to build web applications and wants users to try it out and once they are stable you package everything together and sell an appliance that can help host these services in your enterprise (Software As A Service – SaaS). So users can use these from their browsers without requiring to install anything, but at the same time data remains behind the firewall and so is safe.

2. Google will provide API access to the spreadsheets so you will be able to manipulate your spreadsheets from other applications, and be able to send values, recalculate certain fields and get the calculated columns.

Now this is interesting!

Ok, so does that remind you of Ananya? It sure does! 🙂

And what is Google upto next? Google Presentations? Google Web Designer? If you ask me, I should say a full fledged development environment that can work out of a browser, full with syntax validating editors, inbuilt compilers, databases, web-servers and code sync utilities is something really cool to work on. That way, software is easy to maintain and also this ensures that people are using the same version of the products for development and thus eliminates some common problems faced during software development. Is anyone listening?

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World Wide Web

Microsummaries – a new feature in Firefox 2

Ever felt that the title of bookmarks should be more lively, just like the pages themselves? Microsummaries are just that.

I just hit upon this wonderful feature when I was reading my feeds.

The idea behind Microsummaries is to have some service in the browser periodically fetch the most important content in a page and then use this as the page title.

Some places where this is useful is stock quotes, front page news stories etc.

Here's a screenshot:



I tried to create a Summary bookmark, which fetches the most recent bookmarks from the del.icio.us RSS feed. Although I expected it to work, it didn't. 🙁 Firebug showed an exception everytime the back-end service was called. The browser is still in the Alpha release, so I am pretty confident the feature will be better when the browser is released.

There are a host of other new features in the next version of Firefox, but what I am specially interested in, is the Places system of bookmarking (scheduled to be released with version 3).

Bookmarking is indeed undergoing a revolution in the way they are used in the browser!

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World Wide Web

Semantic web and privacy issues

Whoa! This is something interesting.

On one side are the people who are talking about making interesting analysis from information over the web and on the other side are people who are talking about its potential threat to privacy.

Well, I am talking about collecting data from various sources and then making interesting analysis from this data. And this data could be of facts, things or 'people'.

Entity analytics is not something new to the Semantic Web. There is some work going on in the field of Relationship resolution (Who is who), Identity Resolution (Who knows who) and Anonymous Resolution (Who is who and who knows who, anonymously). And this is really important because it helps organizations combat against frauds and threat.

But the concern raised in this article in BBC cannot be ignored. The most striking statement made here by Hugh Glaser, Southampton University, with reference to the web is, “All of this data is public data already. The problem comes when it is processed”.

You better leave the needle in the hay. Don't try to analyze and find out where I had been last Friday!

Ok, so what is the solution. Role based security at the data source level is something that I can think of. Build security into the core of the system. This way, no data can get out without people having proper access permissions.

Another solution is to make sure users 'mark' data as available for analysis and if so what kind of analysis. Using data for sampling (individuals being totally anonymous) might not be really bad.

Well, this is something that I feel are some solutions that might be considered to solve this problem. Time will tell.

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World Wide Web

Thoughts about Google Notebook, Google Co-op and people tagging in the enterprise

Time advances, so does technology. So although a lot of ideas are hovering in my mind and I have been updating myself with the happenings in the software world, I somehow could not find time to compose a blog entry and share my views. Work has kept me busy like never before.

So let me try and consolidate everything into one entry here:

First and foremost, Google. Whew! These guys never stop (Yahoo, wake up!).

Google released the Google Notebook some time back. I have been trying this for about a week now and it is quite satisfactory.

Let me start with the pros and then go to the cons.

The tool is a quickie. Clip it and click on Add Note and you are done. It cannot be simpler (unless they provide some keyboard shortcut like Ctrl-Shift-C to copy and paste in Google Notebook). You can add your own notes or edit existing ones. You can clip images too! The search is there as always (almost taken for granted when it is Google 🙂 ).

It also allows us to make private notes or make notebooks public.

And now to the cons…

The first is a security issue. As some people are mentioning, the ease of use of this tool may tempt users to clip private data from intranets and store it in Google's servers. And Google has the right to index it.

There is absolutely no meta-data attachment. No tagging! :O (How can people forget tagging in the Web 2.0 world?!)

It is not easy to relate articles. The best way to do this is to create a new section and put everything under it, but this will tire you soon.

There is no export feature. This is a big threat. You start clipping things and you are tied to Google possibly forever!

Ok, we now proceed to the next application Google released -> Google Co-op.

Google Co-op allows users to customize the search results that Google generates (does that sound like Eurekster Swicki?).

The interesting feature here is the extensibility that Google provides in specifying topics of interest, the keywords, links etc.

And what does Google get in return? Lots of meta-information. How nice it would be, if people give you a list of words that fall in a particular category? Google will definitely relish this!

With the hopes that Google does not turn bad, let us enjoy the cool features that they provide and the competition that they face. Competition enables innovation and that is good news for end users.

Some other things that I heard recently: People tagging in the enterprise. This reminds me of a discussion that I had with my mentor some time back.

Let us suppose that I have a list of contacts in my Sametime list. How will I categorize these people? By their teams? Well, may be so.

But someday, I would want to send a mail to all people who are active in some particular community. Or I would want to know the set of people who I have contacted for a particular purpose, which is not necessarily related to their present team. Now is it possible for me to get this view of the users?

People tagging is all about this. Here is a paper from IBM that talks about people tagging in the enterprise.

The concept is simple, but extremely powerful. The idea is to tag people, the way you tag links in a bookmarking tool. Once you do that, you can find all people who belong to a particular tag.

Tagging is central to almost all resources today and will soon form part of the filesystem. (Heard of semantic filesystems?). The line between the functions/services provided by the operating system and the services provided in the internet will diminish and will result in the emergence of the first generation of Web O/Ses. Soon, Web O/Ses will be THE O/Ses.

A departing thought. Today I saw an alert in my mailbox that talked about the next generation web. Wonder where this article is from? Deccan Herald! I don't know how many of them noticed it, but this is news that the semantic web is catching on. The article talked about how Google threw unexpected results for (mostly technical) words that had more than one meaning and how semantic web can help solve this.

Whoa. Enough for today. 🙂

Categories
World Wide Web

Wikipedia in RDF

This blog entry is not quite to do with what Wikipedia in RDF is all about, but the kind of problems that I faced in using it.

When I initially read about the Wikipedia in RDF initiative, I was excited. Imagine being able to download the meta information of ALL the articles of Wikipedia and then being able to query it, analyze it and do anything that you would want to do with it.

I loyally downloaded the gzip for RDF/XML format. The zip file size is 397 MB and the unzipped size is supposed to be 3.7 GB (supposed to be, because I did not have enough space in a single partition to unzip the entire zip. I initially had doubt if XP supports files of this size, but saw some page, which said that the maximum file size is the size of the volume in NTFS partitions).

Ok, here come a host of problems. I conducted my experiments in a 256 MB system. I guess the processor is not bad; it is a 1.7GHz Celeron system.

In order to analyze this file, I should first extract it. I extracted this zip partly (about 800 MB) and then tried to open it in my text editor – SciTE. I was disappointed. The file did not open. I then tried Wordpad (I did not dare to try Notepad!), Vim (for Windows), Edit (from cmd.exe) and Mozilla Firefox.

The best response I got was from Edit (I am not surprized. I have done some tests before and I saw that Edit is the best text editor in Windows!), which clearly said it cannot handle files of that size and it will show the first 65000 odd lines. Decent. I atleast get to view 65000 lines!

The second best response was from Mozilla Firefox. I had some problems here. Firefox tried to parse the file, since it was in RDF. I changed the extension to txt so as to avoid parsing and tried again. Firefox immediately started loading the file. It occupied about 150MB of memory, just before it stopped working.

Vim was bad too. 🙁 The file just did not open and Vim made an abnormal exit.

So I am left with a host of problems before I can start playing with this file.

Is there any text editor that I can use to open this file? I guess there should be SOME editor that does caching and is written specially to load huge files.

Ok, now on to the second problem. I am thinking of making some analysis using this RDF document. In order to do that I should be able to 'load' the entire file in memory (because it requires an XML parsing of RDF), or else I cannot use it. I guess I should use FileChannel to create a map of the file and a pull parser to parse the file.

I have not tried this, but I am cent per cent sure that I will face problems. Size does matter!

Wish me luck. 🙂

Categories
My Updates

ISL Project Interview

I had been to college today for the ISL Internship Interview. 3 of us (me, Kulki and Suresh) left early morning, each with only 4 hours of sleep last night.

We left early morning at around 6:30 and reached by 10:30. The process comprised of a written test followed by interview for short-listed candidates.

We ended up selecting 6 students. It was not an easy job!

I felt really bad looking at the sullen faces of the students who were not selected, especially when I realized I was part of the decision. But then destiny plays its role and I guess we made the right choices.

Thanks to all the co-ordinators. In all, it was a nice (although tiring) experience.