/home/dhananjay

That does sound counterintuitive indeed. But here’s why as you twitter more, using friendfeed is only going to help you get better at it.

Brief Introduction

Friendfeed is a lifestreaming service. You create an account and link it to many other of your information sources eg. your blog, your twitter account, delicious, flickr, google reader etc. This is called your feed. Anytime you post a blog entry, bookmark on delicious, post a photo to flickr, or share a post on google reader, friendfeed’s watching you. It pulls it all together into one feed – your friendfeed. Friendfeed has a similar subscription model like twitter as well. You subscribe to your friend’s friendfeed. You now start getting their unified feeds getting streamed into your home page on friendfeed.

So how does using friendfeed help ?

Friendlists

Friendfeed gives you three friendlists – Personal, Professional and Favorites in addition to the default Home list. You can create additional friendlists. eg. I create lists like interesting, geeks, social-media etc. etc. The people I would generally like to monitor, I put them in my Home list. In addition people whose tweets/feed items I don’t want to miss – I put them in the Favorites list. In addition, I classify people into other lists based on my preferred categories for following. Now I know that even when I am back to my computer after a long time away, I can still follow my favourites by clicking on the Favorites group. People I may choose to follow only infrequently, I can move to a list different from the home feed. Use it whichever way you want. A little experimenting and you’ll be on your way.

Twitter Integration

If you are a power twitter user, the first thing you would want to do is link your twitter account. This is bidirectional. All your tweets will appear in most cases near instantaneously on your feed as well. In your settings panel there’s a link called “Twitter Publishing Preferences”. Click on that and that will allow you to have the entries in your friendfeed getting posted to twitter as well. Make sure to tick the checkbox “Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)“. This will ensure that whatever gets tweeted to from friendfeed will not point back to the friendfeed entry but to the source entry instead. You can also selectively choose the feed items that you would like to push to twitter. Now anything you tweet is pulled into friendfeed and anything you post to friendfeed (and the entries it pulls in from other sources as well) are pushed into twitter. Sometimes all you’ve to do is to just click an hyperlink to tweet it (eg. Like).

These are the things you no longer need to explicitly tweet (assuming you’ve set up the integration and the feed into twitter).

• Interesting Pages : Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet to mark the pages you like. They now find their way to twitter.
• Bookmarked Pages : Friendfeed will pull your entries from delicious and push them into twitter.
• Pages in your RSS feeds : Just share them on google reader and they will be soon tweeted to your friends.
• Photos : Just post the photos to flickr and your followers on twitter will know
• Interesting messages : Just click ‘Like’ against the same on Friendfeed. This is similar to retweeting

Come to think of it – isn’t it a reasonably large proportion of your tweets ? Notice the pattern ? You are doing your actions right at the source. You now no longer need to come to twitter, typing a message, adding a URL and then tweeting it – its all automatic.

Not all my twitter friends have an account on friendfeed

For starters you can have friendfeed scan your twitter friends to check if they are on friendfeed and you can start following them immediately. There are some who may not be on friendfeed. There’s a solution there too. Add that person as an imaginary friend, and against that imaginary friend set up his various streams (eg. twitter, blog, delicious etc.). You’re ready to go. Note having a friendfeed account helps all your other friends too since they do not need to create and maintain an imaginary account for you. If you are not on their must follow list, they just might choose not to spend that effort.

But the twitter web api / tweetdeck gives me a way to scan replies/references to me on twitter and create search streams

Fear not – that has a solution too. Run the search on twitter (for replies/references use “@twitter_user_id” as the search string. You will see a RSS feed corresponding to that search. Now take that rss feed and plug it into another imaginary account as an RSS feed, and all the search results will now be visible on your home feed (or in the group feed wherever you’ve associated that imaginary user).

Other services

Well, as an example I cited your blog, delicious account, and google reader account as information sources. Friendfeed supports tons of them. So the integration into twitter can be extended to (amongst many other possibilities)

• Tumbles into tumblr
• Stumbles on StumbleUpon
• Books you recommended on GoodReads or LibraryThing
• Pages you dugg on digg
• Posts you voted up on reddit
• Any other status messages you posted to facebook or brightkite
• Music on iLike or Last.fm
• Comments on backtype, disqus or intensedebate
• Videos you posted on vimeo or youtube
• Presentations you posted to slideshare
• Events you posted to Upcoming
• Any other RSS feed you may want to send out to the twitterverse

Thats quite a bit. What else ?

You can click on the best of day / week / month to find entries made by your friends which were liked the most. And if you are into cyberstalking, you can really get a virtually realtime capability by creating an imaginary friend and then linking it to all the services you want to follow for him/her (I know I am being mean – but what the heck – friendfeed pulls in only the publicly available information)

I am now getting greedy. Sure there’s nothing more

Hmm .. you can create groups and subscribe to them along with many other friends. Any specific focused topics you are likely to get into that you don’t want to bother a large part of your followers with ? Don’t send the messages to your default feed – send them to the group. Now these will only get delivered to the friendfeed users subscribed to the group and your twitter followers can have a easier time because you don’t suddenly flood their twitstream with (in their perception) arcane / irrelevant stuff. And have you ever irritated your facebook friends by streaming your tweets into facebook just because you didn’t want to enter status updates twice ? Well now you can stream facebook into friendfeed into twitter. So if you want the update to be in both twitter and facebook, just enter it in facebook, and if you would like to see it in twitter alone of the two, enter it in either friendfeed or twitter.

So get cracking – create a friendfeed account. If you are not too sure who to subscribe to, I’m a nice person to follow. On both twitter and friendfeed, I maintain two personas. d7y (twitter, friendfeed) is the personal and free wheeling side of me, while dnene (twitter, friendfeed) focuses on programming, software design and architecture aspects. See you on friendfeed and twitter simultaneously.

I had a funny feeling as I was getting to leave the blogcamp. A feeling of incompleteness. A feeling that something had gone inconsistent with my expectations. A feeling of disappointment. Maybe it was unreal expectations. After all this was the first blogcamp I had attended. But it certainly wasn’t the first conference I had attended.

Soon after I expressed that feeling of disappointment, I did get a few DMs n tweets wondering why. Sure seemed like I was one of the less excited people at the end of the blogcamp – a small minority perhaps. But there was an event, an event which I decided I had to act upon and express. For no other reason, but that it was the right thing to do. And if I ruffle any feathers along the way, so be it – with one caveat. I still think the unorganisers did a tremendous job of just putting the act together and providing a platform for so many people to come together and interact. Nothing I mention is meant to replace or override my deep appreciation and gratitude towards the unorganisers for that. I am certain there were other positives as well, but when you are writing a rant, its important to focus on the rant.

So here were some issues that contributed to my disappointment at the blogcamp.

• Understanding of Audience segmentation :

  To me for any event of this size, the audience is the king. The organisation of the sessions needs to be conducted towards maximising the audience value. There existed segments of diversity in the audience here. Part of that diversity actually already showed itself up in a thread prior to the blogcamp on the post Why you should attend BlogCampPune – 2. Some bloggers were already less than keen to attend a blogcamp. In general, I have gathered that there seem to be three primary blogger profiles. The expressionists focus on blogs as a vehicle for their creativity and expression. The amateur enthusiast value drivers focus on treating a blog as a vehicle to provide a substantial value to their audience and often end up classifying themselves into specific niches to be able to maximise that value. Finally there are those who treat blogs as a vehicle of commerce. There was no apparent attention to any of this segmentation. And as any person especially with a marketing background will tell you – segmentation is critical, to be able to provide maximum value. I have to be speculating here, but I felt this camp could’ve been run better if this segmentation had been addressed. Have global discussions spanning all, followed by birds of feather separation. Separate threads running for each segment of the audience. It would still not provide the maximum potential value for each audience member, but certainly would at least contribute to optimisation.

  Due to lack of concrete data, I am going to proceed on an uninformed conclusion. That the audience (there were 125+ of them) was predominantly non commercial in focus and was there to learn how to make their blog content superior. Blog marketing, page views, SEO was not at the top of their priorities. And yet the first two talks in the primary room devoted extensive attention and time to these topics. I have no issue with the topics, but given my uninformed conclusion, I just thought that it was a poor fit for the large audience.

• Logistics and Infrastructure :

  While SICSR is a great patron of local events, one has to understand that its architecture is not particularly suited for Open Space based events. Two classrooms – one large and one small with small exit points don’t allow for easy movement of people. So attempting to conduct a set of sessions based on Open Space Technology (something I shall question later) in that architecture was definitely something to ponder upon. This was not an insignificant issue. It was an important issue which led to a substantial dilution of one set of sessions and a suboptimisation of the net result whichever way one looked at it. Instead this very architecture could’ve been leveraged by focusing on conducting separate session threads, each collectively addressing a different audience segment. An opportunity that was missed.

  There was also another way to segment in this case. The projector in the second room did not work with many laptops due to a faulty cable. One could’ve classified the presentations as “projected” and “non projected” thus helping reduce the substantial downtime in booting up each individual talk. But that was not to be either.

• Time Management :

  A fair amount of time was spent upfront in every blogger introducing himself at some length. I think thats a great idea for a group of say 25 bloggers. But in a group of 125+ people the rule no. 3 in the Barcamp rules should’ve gotten applied – only 3 word intros. There was even a amusing situation I saw of one presentation extending itself with no intervention from the unorganisers, and finally one of the audience actually started playing the ringtone from his mobile just to hurry up the closure. If that was an isolated session it wouldn’t have been important. But combined with the fact that there was no segmentation based on audience interest, along with the fact that simultaneous presentations were scheduled with parallel time slots, and one of the two rooms started to be behind schedule, meant people’s planned juggling between the rooms also went for a toss. I for example had to leave before Navin’s presentation ended and had to miss Vishal and Sandy’s presentations, as the other room was apparently on schedule and I had to reach there well in time to prepare for my presentation and then struggle with the faulty cable for a long time. I don’t know if that disruption happened for others or not.

To me personally the biggest factors for my disappointment were :

• The lack of focused threads (BOF) meant that I ended up attending the commercial / success focused presentations and missing the content or blogging experience focused presentations eg Sandy’s.
• I felt a strong focus on marketing, pageviews, SEO etc. in Ankesh, Ankur and Jim Karter’s presentation – focus I thought was perhaps not why a majority of the audience had come there. I heard Navin articulate reader value and content. (I missed Meeta’s presentation entirely and Aditto’s partially). But what came across as the overriding impression was that there was a big imbalance between, the % speakers focused on blog success through tactics (SEO, Marketing) and those on content and readers vis. a vis. the same percentage spread from an audience interest perspective. I must admit that I enjoyed Jim’s presentation thoroughly as a manager and not as a blogger – at the clean and incisive way of approaching blogging as a commercial enterprise. However this was also the strongest element in my disappointment – that blogging is being viewed at so very commercially. I have sufficient commercial considerations in my daily activities. It was just completely disappointing to see bloggers discuss pageviews, clicks and SEO as the goal and content as the vehicle to reach the goal, with value to readers being just the necessary component for the ecosystem. Raised in me exactly the same cynicism that I have such an abundance of, when I come across managers discuss a P&L as the goal, with the commercial offerings as a vehicle to reach the goal, and customers being a necessary participant in the ecosystem. I shall leave the reader to decide where the cart is and where the horse lies.
• The changing rules had me confused. I first prepared for a half an hour presentation, then changed it due to an apparent statement in the media that no presentation would be allowed to go beyond 10 minutes only to find again that the time slots were 30 minutes. Add to that the necessity of having to leave an interesting presentation and struggle with the setup for some time. (I really detest ever keeping an audience waiting for more than a minute – seems like I ended up keeping them waiting for ages). I am not quite sure what exactly the rules were as far as the presentation time slots was concerned.

Trigger
I did refer to the fact that there was an event that happened which actually triggered this response. It was the publication of this “Post BlogCamp Pune Self-Analysis kit” (especially starting with slide 13). So I did the self analysis. And I did not restrict my analysis to self – I pulled in the whole blogcamp and the notion of blogcamp and the rules around a blogcamp and Open Space Technologies. I did an analysis on the whole set. Barcamp, Blogcamp, Open Spaces are all new terms for me. But when I am faced with “Laws”, the first thing I generally do is to try to do my homework. So I decided to explore these laws on Wikipedia.

Turns out the four rules and law of two feet are an essential tenet of the Open Space Technology. Also turns out Open Spaces help especially in the following context as per Wikipedia :

Proponents[who?] claim that OST suits groups of any size; groups ranging from five to several thousand participants have used it. According to its proponents[who?], it works best under the following conditions:

1. the topic of the meeting involves a real business issue (however one defines “business”)
2. the participants really care about that issue
3. the issue has so much complexity that no single person or small group can fully understand it
4. the issue requires highly diverse skills and people for a successful resolution
5. the participants have genuine passion about the issue; which can often include conflict (compare criterion 2)
6. the issue requires immediate action (a “decision time of yesterday”)

There was no issue that required immediate action here in the blogcamp per se, that we had to focus on. There was no decision we had to reach. So was this a completely inappropriate choice? Not really. Unconferences share many characteristics of Open Spaces, and BarCamp introduces a further variation. Interestingly the page on Barcamp states (emphasis mine)

FooCamps and BarCamps are based on a simplified variation of Open Space Technology (OST), leaving out some key elements like the 4 principles and the Law of the Two Feet but maintaining the self-organizing character of OST.

Now I am confused – are the 4 principles and the law of 2 feet applicable to bar camps ? Apparently those are the Laws we should’ve remembered while conducting the self analysis. And theres one more set of rules for a Barcamp. This includes the 3 word introduction as one of the rules. It also states “Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.” I would interpret that as stating that presentations should get terminated once a time slot is over. And while a time slot is flexible, that it varies between 10 minutes and 30 minutes is inconveniencing to say the least.

So exactly what are the rules and the Law here ? I’m confused. And with regards to moving around etc. may I suggest the architecture of the location simply wasn’t the most conducive. If I may put forth the thought that under a classroom situation, it might just be better to move around the speakers and their time slots to suit the audience rather than expecting the audience to move around.

So next time we have a bar/blog camp, am I likely to refrain from attending it ? Far from it, I would like to see if I can contribute positively. But not as an unorganiser. As an organiser. There are some situations and contexts where the highly unstructured plays work. And there are some where they don’t. The important thing is to not focus on the structure of the event – focus on the value to the attendees. 125 people for 6 hours is 750 person hours of attention. Its important to use it most effectively.

Suggestion
Next time we hold a barcamp / blogcamp, lets take cognisance of at least two factors. If it is a classroom structure lets adapt to it. And if the audience is diverse, lets work to figure out how it can be segmented and Birds of a Feather colocated. And finally lets understand the audience a bit better and encourage content which satisfies their needs and tickles their imagination in appropriately proportional terms. And lets have rules. We need rules. But if the audience isn’t satisfied, lets screw the rules and service the audience.

And if you are wondering where audience entered the barcamp vocabulary – when you have 100+ attendees and about 10 speakers, it means you have a 90+ audience at the minimum. Not what barcamps were perhaps designed for.

So we have elections coming up soon, and I start wondering. Great, there is the drive for online petitions, voter enrollment and a general push to a jaagore. Its nice to know we are all waking up in even more numbers. But there is a problem. Its a rude wakeup. A blissful icy dream protected by ignorance and disinterest is suddenly a raging inferno of cynicism searching for a target with the hopeless realisation that there is no one to blame and probably no one who is blameless.

So having woken up, and finding a vote to spare, how does one use it ? And what are the options ?

1. You have a favourite political party.  It could be accused of pandering to one or more of populism, communalism, communism, regionalism, casteism. So what if its leaders come grace your TV screens every news night and indulge with their peers in ‘barkism and bitism’. You rest your hopes in the party and you vote for its candidate. The great thing about it is often one vote can buy you so many isms. The difficulty is that many of the leaders put their rivals down rather than India up. You can’t get Indianism. Its tough to get truism. Even though I don’t expect it, its virtually impossible to get altruism. Ho Hum.
2. You have a favourite candidate who you believe is honest, incorruptible, dedicated and probably even skilful enough to survive the rough and the tumble should he make the grade. The problem is that he may even do great at the hustings, but just may not have what it takes to reach the winning post first. Any vote cast here seems like a vote squandered
3. Use the 49-O protest vote. The trouble with that is it makes no practical difference between that and not going to the polling booth at all. Sure it is an explicit protest vs. an implicit protest, but is the distinction really important ? I can’t quite buy it.
4. Don’t vote at all. Seems attractive, but I don’t consider being fatalistic as a virtue even when the chips are down.

Amongst these choices “2” seems to be the least unattractive. But a more dominant feeling seems to be the need to hear a ‘lori’ n go back to sleep hoping that jaagore might just have been a dream.

Note : This post is not to encourage you to not vote. I will vote. It is just to indicate that voting requires votability, a sorely missing commodity at the moment.

Disclaimer :I am not a lawyer, neither do I claim to understand law well. The perspective below is based on my reading of the two bills which was not conducted in complete rigour and detail. The following is my understanding it. For a legally valid opinion kindly consult a lawyer.

Just last month, the Indian Parliament passed the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006. The bill is currently pending Presidential assent (to the best of my knowledge) and is expected to become a law soon. Unfortunately this document is a little hard to follow since it refers to changes made to the earlier applicable version of the law as defined by The Information Technology Act, 2000. One has to read them side by side to understand the full import. This post primarily focuses on the implications of the changes to the law but may refer from time to time to the implications of the earlier version as well.

Digital Signatures and Certificates : This is a very large section of the bill. I think I shall need to read it more carefully. So I am completely skipping that section and may choose to write separately about it later.

Computer networks and their security :

This bill now brings into purview wireless networks (the word wireless got added to the definition of a network). While an intermediary earlier was someone who stored or transmitted a message, it is a far broader definition as stated below.

Note that a message has been replaced by a record which broadens the scope quite a bit, and in my perhaps lay interpretation is likely to bring under its purview all the software as a service or a network service providers.

Offenses

The earlier law had two offenses listed in this section, which now have increased. Lets take a look at them.

The first offense description related to tampering of source code continues to remain the same unchanged -

The next offense Hacking with a computer system is now far less precise, and loosely means any dishonest or fraudulent activity in the context of a number of computer related activities as described in Section 43. That section incidentally has now been supplemented by Section 43A which under its purview now requires “body corporates possessing, dealing or handling any sensitive personal data” to maintain reasonable security practices and procedures (with a two year prison sentence in case of default). I will not dwell on Section 43 since it lists out a broad range of activities which can have negative consequences on computer systems and networks.

A new offense description can now be found as follows :

This is an onerous clause requiring us to be very careful in many of our online communications. I think to the extent it brings in accountability in online communications it is welcome. It is my belief that both the prosecution or courts are unlikely to pull people up for frivolous comments unless there are strong negative consequences and / or it is a persistent activity with a deliberately negative intent. However I still feel concerned about the rather loose wording which still could get misused.

The next offense is related to pornography. The first clause of the offense continues to the best of my reading ablities to be unmodified

However it has now been further expanded by the following

I could not find any reference in my reading to either consumption or storage of pornographic content to be an offense.

Interception and Decryption : While the wordings are different I could not find any substantive changes in the clauses related to the state rights to Interception and Decryption, except that the word Monitoring has also got added. But its safe to say that the Central Government can pretty much continue to snoop on any electronic transmission as they believe necessary. Couldn’t really figure out what if any difference this bill makes.

Modifications to the Indian Penal Code : The penal code is now applicable to “any person in any place without and beyond India committing offense targeting a computer resource located in India”. So people who are not residents or citizens of India targeting Indian computer systems are now classified as offenders. Incidentally it should be noted that the penal code already applies to “Any citizen of India in any place without and beyond India”. However that seems to be now made much clearer by the explanation which states that “the word offense includes every act committed outside India which, if committed in India, would be punishable under this Code”. While I am not certain about it my lay reading seems to indicate that Indian Citizens committing violations outside India will be eligible to be flagged as offenders. If my interpretation is correct, Indian Citizens involved in publishing or transmitting pornography or in activities which could get classified as an offender as per this law, , will get classified as offenders under the act in India, even if such activities are legal in the parts of the world where they or their computer systems reside. However I must insist I am not too sure about this.

A law misconstrued and misunderstood ? I wasn’t quite sure how to react to blog posts like “India Sleepwalks To Total Surveillance“. However I really can’t respect the way the bill has been represented. Some of the bold statements in the post say, “Thou shall not author a joke. Not even forward one”, “Thou shall not surf Bollywood news” and ” Thou shall not watch porn”. I really could not find any evidence to support such views whatsoever. The sad part is that such posts get picked up in articles like Blogger Writes from Inside the Newest Police State on the Planet, discussions such as slashdot - India Sleepwalks Into a Surveillance Society and tweets such as these. I have spent about 6 years in US, and the remainder in India. I have always been very happy with the freedoms I have received in India, even though I do know that very unfortunately a small proportion of the population does get victimised or harassed due to the stringent laws from time to time. I won’t be surprised if a substantial proportion of Indian Citizens actually support the clauses against pornography. And finally the draft bill has been under discussion since 2006 so I couldn’t understand how the world’s largest democracy sleepwalked into something (though I am certain this and another bill got completely fast tracked after the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks). The fact of the matter is that this has always been a state of stringent laws, with laws which don’t always agree fully with the western world. I think we should rate our laws based on our aspirations and desires. While I shudder at the privileges the government has in terms of eavesdropping, I am quite ambivalent on the strictures against pornography and greatly welcome the enhancements related to electronic signatures and increased accountability in terms of online communication and network security maintenance. Its really a mixed bag in my opinion. If at all India is to be considered a police state as in some opinions, in my opinion it is certainly not because of this bill.

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.

High time they had this coming. The state of news seems to have been crumbling for some time and journalistic standards were not being adhered to. A group of people called the Pen Pricks got together and pulled off a hoax (link to a hoax press release) (Update: The link at the left is no longer valid. Not sure where the document can be found now.) and thus exposed the media for their complete lack of journalistic standards. Of course the foreign media had a great time having a bit of a laugh at Indian media’s expense.

It tells us a lot about the credibility of the stuff we pay to get delivered to us daily. What is telling is not one but many many newspapers ran the story. Its sad and unfortunate, but a nice kick in the rear end was probably well deserved. One only prays that it will sound a bit of a wake up call else journalism and news will fall prey to the every munching monster called deadlines and bottomlines.