/home/dhananjay

Had a fair degree of fun trying to figure out all the logos in the quiz : How Web 2 are you ? I got about 24 correct in the first unresearched pass, but then spent some time figuring out the remainder. Here’s the full set of answers (drumroll ! ! !) .. (Click on the text to go to the site)

Technorati	Twitter	Feedburner	Stumble Upon	Rollyo
Flickr	Blogger	Zimbra	Newsvine	Digg
Netvibes	Wordpress	Photobucket	Del.icio.us	Skype
Boxee	reddit	Basecamp	Rapleaf	LinkedIn
edocr	Remember The Milk	Facebook	You Tube	Last FM
GMail	Yuuguu	MySpace	Slideshare	Qik
Seesmic	Bebo	Moo	Huddle

I still remember being impressed by Karl Marx and Communism in the early eighties only to be strong believer in Capitalism by the end of the decade. Since then, I have rarely looked back to question my faith in Capitalism until the economic crisis of 2008. In that questioning sweep got captured one more apparently unimpeachable cornerstone of my faith – Democracy. I don’t know if I should’ve felt so surprised on the realisation that these two have almost identical strengths and failings.

Billy Joel would find ripe pickings on both legislative and financial markets (yes both are markets with the difference being the currency – votes and notes) around the world, should he want to extend “We Didn’t Start the Fire (in Flash)”. This song talks about many significant episodes in the 20th century, many of them with negative consequences. It also talks about the individual refrain in terms of absolving self of responsibility by saying – we didn’t start the fire.

Both Democracy and Capitalism are feedback based auto correcting systems. This is their strength. This is what makes them sustainable, and perhaps the best options in the long run. This is also their weakness. The feedback loop takes time to act (it won’t kick in until the fuel for the collectively sponsored ponzi scheme runs out) and by the time it does, the wrong steps have levied a heavy toll. But as these systems have proved time and time again, that even if inefficient these are the most effective systems. But this has come at a cost. The’ve strengthened our faith in them at the cost of our faith in ourselves. If the system is responsible to correct itself, surely an individual does not need to play much of a role – we simply go with the system and correct ourselves as it does and pay the tabs that it leaves for us in the process – Right ?

There are things that we can ask ourselves in advance before the systems go through their next sinusoidal dive. Should I be investing if the market that seems to be going up too fast because others are investing, should I be voting for someone who promises growth over healing since others are doing so, should I be borrowing so that my expenditure can exceed my incomes since others are doing so, should I be expecting rich valuations for my efforts which I can’t understand because others are expecting so, and should I be making promises that are likely difficult to keep because others are doing so. While being able to identify the trend (and especially the correction) in time can offer rich pickings, I don’t know that most of us would be able to pull it off. However what we can do is apply common sense. In many cases if it doesn’t make sense for you, it eventually wont make for the system which shall then auto correct. In the meanwhile you have these choices – if you have confidence in your abilities to time the system, exploit it but get out just in time, or take responsibility to be a contrarian and act for yourself now, or go with the flow and sing “We didn’t start the fire” later.

Clubhack had earlier pointed out that 51% of pune’s wireless points are open. This was talked about in a ndtv broadcast earlier today.

Had earlier blogged about it in “How can an ISP not be up to date on security” which was further reinforced in WPA cracked in 15 minutes or less, or your next router’s free. Definitely need more awareness and ClubHack is making a useful contribution.

Went to the Pune OpenCoffee Club meet yesterday. It was supposed to focus on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Scalability and Sun Startup Essentials Program.

Search Engine Optimisation – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

I really liked this session. It is always refreshing to see a very down to earth speaker explain things broken down in a very simple way (tinge of jealousy at my end ?). While I feel like a नीम हाकीम (half doctor or amatuer) on this topic since I know only parts of it, I came back with some more insights into the space and some comfort in knowledge that the little I knew wasn’t way off the mark.

Anyways, here’s what Dimakh had to say on the topic :

Make sure you know what keywords you are conducting the SEO. Don’t forget the site name itself in the process. For good SEO, focus on the following issues (listed in a descending priority as per Dimakh, he said Google hasn’t ever published the priorities)

• Content : It is important to make sure your content is in tune with the desired topics and keywords. Make sure the keywords (and sometimes even the phrases) you want to optimise for are covered in the content. Google does look at the keyword density in the content and that can influence your site rankings.
• Domain : It is preferable to have the important word or two about your site in the domain itself. eg. You may consider having a site domain as sushrut-icecream-parlour.com instead of sushrut.com (I am not sure if he would’ve preferred the hyphens there – just applying my own thoughts here).
• Filename : Make sure your filenames (ie. those in the URL) actually reflect the content.
• Tags : Ensure that the tags (meta?) reflect the content appropriately
• Alt Tags : Use the alt tags to enrich the information available to the search engine to better understand the images or hyperlinks. Keep them short but give enough info to the search engine eg. in a link to a file called enquiry.html, have the alt tag mention “Enquiry for Motors”.
• Internal Links : Make sure it is easy for the spider to traverse through your site using the various links. Sometimes you may want to provide an alternative navigation mechanism if the default mechanism is not easily understood by a search engine (I assume he was referring to things like a Flash based navigation)
• External Links : I really couldn’t understand what he implied here (probably because I got a little lost into thinking when I should’ve been listening), but some could help fill out the stuff in the comments below.

Finally Dimakh mentioned Seo Root and Google Rankings as sites to visit for further learnings. On the whole a very helpful session. One more karma point Pune Open Coffee Club earned in my books.

Web Scalability by Sun Microsystems :

(I missed the first couple of mins, hence didn’t catch the presenter names). The presentation focused on a toolkit designed for prototyping various technical and architectural issues around web 2.0 applications called Olio. Its a very nice and capable tool which in the words of the web site can be used for the following activities :

• Understand how to use various web2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. in the creation of your own application. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
• Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
• Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
• Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
• Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

An excellent piece of content that was poorly targeted imho. Sun has an extended amount of experience dealing with enterprise architects, and this was a really wonderful presentation which most enterprise architects would’ve understood easily. This particular community of people often need to do their homework very well, and usually are allowed a fair amount of time and money to do their homework, and in many cases also have access to a body of people who are also equally capable in working out various issues related to architecture.

I really think this is a useful tool which can be used by startups but that they shall need to spend the time to understand the tool and what it could do for them. However it is not a point and shoot kind of a tool. Based on the questions I could very easily understand that most persons very quickly ended up assuming that the tool could do much more than what the tool authors ever intended, and then felt disappointed. This was really a situation of positioning gone awry and I think Sun will need some more effort in positioning the presentation in its early stages to prevent disappointment later.

Finally as in a question I did ask quite explicitly, the reason why it makes sense for Sun to invest in and open source such a tool, is that this tool really forces you to do your homework well in the first place. If you were to do your homework well in the first place and focus on performance and scalability early on, the tool usage would tell you to either focus on Java or more infrastructure to handle high load or low read percentage scenarios. These are very reasonable and sensible outputs of the tool. What olio does not tell you is the set of tradeoffs which are outside its scope, impact of the various choices of languages and toolkits on spead of release, agility, robustness and maintainability – that is something that the startup architect will need to come to some decision independently.

Finally sun talked about its Startup Essentials Program which offered various promotional incentives to startups. Very useful incentives, though I would advise people to evaluate if usage of such incentives introduces a small degree of lockin onto open solaris (I like opensolaris – just would ensure that I would use it in a manner that doesn’t introduce too much lock in), and also the post production cost implications including support. There were a fair degree of questions through the session, and I think as an audience it makes sense to pause and take the matter offline if the proceedings continue to be stuck at a stage after two or three questions.

Update: A presentation similar to the one presented can be found on Olio site at Olio Presentation

In parting

All in all a very useful session, and a left me with the desire to attend more sessions subsequently. Thanks POCC and all the organisers.

Early Internet usage

I have always been a enthusiastic user of most of the internet capabilities. I started of learning and using ftp and archie and gopher in early 90s, had an opportunity to use the NCSA mosaic browser prior to the Netscape phenomenon, picked up most of my C++ and software design learnings on usenet in the mid 90s, and was well into application development using web technologies and distributed objects by 96. As time progressed, I started using many newer offerings such as portals, forums, groups and  eventually blogs and social networks.

Blogging

Blogging is a very intensely personal activity. Its substantially unicast nature allows one to carefully craft and customise the message that one would like to project. Early in 2008, I found myself with tons of free time. I had stepped out of my earlier assignment at the turn of the year. I was unlikely to get attracted back into the realm of the conventional commercial software development in the short term. While I knew I was wanting to really focus on developing good software, I had no clue what I wanted to do immediately in the short term. While I had worked in senior management positions, managed large size teams and what at least in my perception had built some kick ass software, I felt like I had this whole body of knowledge and experiences to share but didn’t know where or how to share it. I had started a blog earlier but it petered out after about 5 entries, the notable result out of that exercise having been the article, A beginners guide to Dependency Injection which I wrote in July 2005, which Floyd Marinescu, the then editor of TheServerSide.com asked me to put together based on my blog writings.

/var/log/mind :

While many people blog for kicks, and many others for publishing their views and commentary on a large range of topics, and some others from a commercial perspective, I started my blog with a very different purpose. I wanted it to specifically focus on issues and matters related to software engineering ie programming, design and architecture, issues I believe I have a lot of experience in and in which I can pretend to talk intelligently. My objective was to share the understandings I had internalised through many of my experiences and share them across the relevant audience.  In a very casual mood I decided that I would start blogging again, and /var/log/mind debuted on Jan 3, 2008 with the post “Nice Error Message“. At that point, I was not really clear about what I wanted to blog about except that it would be about software engineering. Anyone familiar with UNIX file system structure will immediately understand the title – its a log file of the mind. Soon I was writing quite passionately and some of the posts focused on the fact that I was wanting to move from Java to scripting languages. These included :

• “Java : if (compete with PHP / Ruby / Python) { stop fixing the syntax and start fixing the runtime }” on April.
• “How In ended up selecting Python for my latest project” on June 9th
• “Performance Comparison – C++ / Java / Python / Ruby/ Jython / JRuby / Groovy” on July 8th
• “Commentary on Python from a Java programming perspective” on September 17th,
• “Python from a Java perspective – Part 2 – How duck typing influences class design and design principles” on September 25th, and
• “Java : the perpetually undead language” on December 11.

I attempted to bring in a manager’s perspective including

• Why merging development and testing makes sense in a TDD / agile environment” on August 12th, and
• “Outsourcing does not suck. Our understanding of it does !” on August 14th,

And of course architecture was never too far from my heart

• “Factors influencing Cache Design” on August 6 and
• “Multicore for Project Managers and Junior Developers” on Nov. 26th.

I also dabbled a little bit with online media

• “Tips for Software / Programming Blogging” on July 23rd,

Focus

While I received very positive feedback on that, I quickly realised that this was an entirely different set of readers and the positive references were coming from a completely different set of sources. Hence I quickly backed off that angle being a little afraid of losing focus. /var/log/mind is intensely focused and completely non frivolous quite deliberately. However when I started it, unlike emails and groups, I wasn’t communicating with people I knew, I was simply broadcasting and hoping someone would find my views interesting enough. Soon enough there were a few people viewing it and subscribing to the feeds. This was a segment of people who were focused on software engineering to a substantial extent (or at least thats what I assume). Till date I have focused on trying to satisfy this small set of people intensely rather than reaching out to larger audiences. I must confess that while I am often tempted to either make the content a little more easier to read or focus on less intense topics, I have chosen to stay away successfully from such temptations. I would like /var/log/mind to be visited regularly by a small set of people seriously focused on software engineering. This in the overall scheme of things is not such a large audience, but its an audience I can connect with readily. Recently I did give in to the temptation of wanting to blog on a lot of internet / social media issues but only by starting a new blog – “Web N.o“.  Finally I am also resurrecting my personal blog /home/dhananjay which will focus on lesser intensive aspects of software, internet and allow me to write on other issues of interests such as Finance, Economics, Current Affairs and Humour.

On Indian readership :

Early on I didn’t quite figure out why if dzone gets more traffic from India than US, I got only low single digit percents from readers based out of India. This remained a puzzle for long. It later dawned on me that my writings were actually targeting much more narrower segment – the people who are really passionate about their programming or engineering, the kind who flock to reddit which has a predominantly higher US traffic. However I have watched the readership grow slowly in no small part due to the helpful words put out by Navin in his writings on PuneTech. In the month of december till date, Indian readership share has crept up to 5%. I can’t imagine my writings being in any way being more relevant to one geographic region than another. Over the next few months I intend to try to understand the rationale behind the discrepancy and attempt to reduce the same at least partially.

Microblogging :

One of the things I do wish when looking back is that I had paid more attention to microblogging. I simply did not realise the power and capability of Twitter till very recently. I must confess to be a very early stage user and look forward to learning how to leverage microblogging. However I have already done my first mistake, so its safe to presume that my learning process has begun. I had put all the people who I wanted to follow into one twitter handle, and a variety of people started following me back. This was a noise disaster in waiting should it be allowed to grow. There was no way that whatever I would write would make sense to a large proportion of the network. I have always believed in focus, and once again I set out to do the same. My belief is that the network is still quite small, and it is important to undo the potential damage even if it is inconvenient in the short term. So the twitter handle “dnene” now focuses on Software and social media topics exclusively. So if you are an IT / Online Media professional thats the one to follow.  The handle “idhananjay” is much more freewheeling, so if you want to see my multiple facets, my humorous side, or my views on current affairs and local issues thats the one to follow. Finally if you are a IT professional based in India, you may consider potentially following both. I shall soon be setting up a third one and thats going to be for personal friends and family. That to me seems like the most logical way to organise to minimise outgoing noise polution on the twitter streams. A similar separation is also happening on the blogging trail – /var/log/mind and Web N.o shall be serious blogs focused on the specific areas attempting to look at the various issues in depth, whereas /home/dhananjay shall be a freewheeling general blog which shall perhaps reflect a more broader, casual, lighter aspects about my views and opinions.

This is a reproduction of a post I made in a closed user group of largely young IT professionals in March, 2008. I believe it is of likely interest for many other young professionals who may want to blog in a professional capacity

About blogging
Blogging started off as an offshoot of the “individual home page” which was more of an homepage which was structured like an online diary (Blog is actually a short form of the word “web log”). However today it has grown very very substantially into a very powerful communication medium which has substantially increased the “expressivity” of individual opinion and a projection of an individual personality. The most read blogs are often those that relate to individuals offering their most private (and sometimes lurid) thoughts for public consumption on the net. Another popular category is the journalistic blogs which trade in news and opinions. This is a great platform for citizen journalism and has now become so powerful that most journalistic houses encourage their professional journalists also to have their own blogs. However what I am going to talk about is a kind of a blog with a very different focus than either of these. I intend to blog about a blog type which is more in line with the target audience of this blog – blogs that deal with professional identity projection.

Why Professional Identity Projection ?
The net is helping the world to shrink to a smaller and smaller world each day. This is a world which is now exploding in the opportunities that it offers in terms of networking resulting in each of us having a larger average professional network size than at anytime in the past. The larger network sizes and the increasing ease of communication means that we have a smaller time and attention span for each individual that we casually interact with. Thus there is a requirement to project a stronger image of oneself (think of it as you being your own brand). This helps you to be able to not only reach a wider audience of people and build stronger networks but also to be able to within such larger audiences conduct more selective targeting. By this I mean the ability to cut through a mass of people who are either not meeting the target segment that you are really interacting with, into those that will make a lot of sense interacting with

How will a Professional Blog help me ?
Potentially in a number of ways

• It creates an identity for you that others can interact with without occupying your time. People can come and read your blogs – understand you and your opinions more without any downtime for you.
• It creates a stronger and focused projection of who you are and what you are focused on. This tremendously helps others understand you much quicker. In very simple terms – as compared to not blogging, it might make you less attractive to half to two thirds of the general audience who my be not so enthusiastic about your views – but it very substantially increases your value in the eyes of the remaining one third to half – and these are probably the people you might find maximum value interacting with.
• This is really important – your blog can be an online extension of your resume. If a one pager with a reference to your blog URL can excite someone – you’ve suddenly bought yourself an increased attention span and interest from someone you want to reach out to.
• Market yourself as a serious focused and thinking person.

When you should not have a professional blog

• You do not have some views or some aspects about yourself that you would like to project to others
• You are not keen on offering either interesting commentary or narrative about something that is very original – ie. something you’ve come up with.

What kinds of blogs can I have
Theres no clear answer here – its really upto you. However some of the possibilities are :

• Technical : say a blog purely focused on Java
• Software Design
• Business : focused on Business Domain happenings in general and trends you foresee
• Project Management

I would like to try it out – where do I go from here

• If you want to offer an interesting thought related to technology, business, management etc. the [..deleted..] blog might be a great place to get started and getting your feet wet
• There are many other free blog hosting sites. jroller.com is a great one if you want to primarily blog about java. blogspot.com (from google) and wordpress.com are other good free blog hosting sites.
• Just run google searches like “introduction to blogging” or “blogging tutorial” and understand the space a little bit more.
• This is a nice introductory document.
• If you do create a blog do keep me posted about it

Important : Read ME
Many companies publish documented guidelines about what you can blog about and what you cannot. Find out if your employer has guidelines about employee blogging activity and respect the same. In general blogging about company proprietary information, plans, designs etc., about internal company news are a strict no-no and can sometimes get you into legal trouble. Bitching about your current or ex-employers or any other similar activities in poor taste are only likely to reflect very poorly on you besides the obvious damage it does to others – make sure your blogs are in a positive spirit. In some cases your employer might maintain a corporate blog – see if makes sense to participate in the same. Also many such guidelines clearly require you to clearly state on your blogs that the opinions are yours and yours alone and not meant to reflect that of your employer.