Shreyas Srinivasan

Chrome Game

I have been reading a lot of reviews about Chrome. Most people seem to be comparing it to Firefox, which i think is underestimating Chromes capabality. I think its has nothing to do with the browser at all, it has everything to do with the platform.

For long we have touted web as a platform, Apple took the first big step when it chose the web as its Platform for the first generation iphone. That approach failed because the web as a platform was flawed, the reasons IMHO were as follows:

• Hard to write stateful web apps
• Lack of per website security (All apps run in the same address space)
• No access to hardware (relates to security)
• Javascript is slow
• No offline support.

When Apple released an SDK it was an admission of defeat. Chris Messina put it beautifully in his blog post Did the web fail the iphone?. With millions of developers and amazing momentum the web has too much to offer for it to not be premium application development platform. So in that sense the browser was not the premium peice, the platform was.

When Google released Chrome, each one of those questions seem to find an answer.

• Hard to write stateful apps/ no offline support: Chrome includes Gears.
• Lack of per website security: Each tab in chrome runs in a seperate process, which also means this process can be given special permissions based on its security certificate! So your bank application can finally update to your harddisk and your passbook can be available offline! Wheee
• No access to hardware: Again comes down to security, read above
• Javascript is slow: Javascript virtual machine in chrome will make it reasonably fast

All this put together makes the web more promising as a platform. There are challenges though, Javascripts continous development as a language is of great importance. Read this if you want to know about JS Harmany and Ecmascript issues.

All in all the chrome platform is of great signifcance, i think its real competitors are j2me/java/cocoa/wpf and not the browsers. Only time will tell if the web as a real platform will materialize.

With great power comes fun conferences

The 10th edition of the Ottawa linux symposium was held between the
23rd and 26th July at the Congress center in Ottawa. Linux symposium
is one of the premium linux conference in the world, Linux developers
from around the world meet and discuss various linux projects and the
roadmap for the future.

I landed in Ottawa on the 22nd. The city is a beautiful mix of
historical and contemporary architecture. In the evening all the
speakers were invited to a cruise acorss the canal, the canal flows
next to a lot of historical monuments. The discussions on board were
focussed on linux as expected, with people discussing topics ranging
from “Ext4 file system” to the “ipv6 stack on Linux”.

The first day of the conference started with Matthew Wilcox presenting
the keynote on “The Kernel: 10 years from in Review”. The talk took
the audience through the journey of linux with various anecdotal
references to Linus. Mathew also gave a brief account of his own
contributions to Linux and how being part of the community had
enriched his life.

The talks this year were dominated by topics which delve into the
kernel or system level features of linux. There was also decent
coverage of Performance, Security, Mobile, UI, Web Applications, and
Green Computing. I did a talk on “Mobile application frameworks” on
the 24th, Although i was initially a bit tense to speak in front of a
room full of distinguished hackers, my talk was well recieved.

The most controversial keynote of the event was presented by Mark
Shuttleworth, CEO of Cannonical (Ubuntu) who spoke about the need for
Free software projects to align their release cycles so a well tested
and professional product can be delivered to the users. I personally
thought that this would kill the diversity of Free software which
thrives on people scratching to their own itches versus a clockwork
release cycle which applies to everyone. Irrespective the talk
presented interesting ideas which will be heavily debated by the
communities for time to come.

Craig Ross, Co-Founder of OLS signed off the event by showing a graph
of T Shirt sizes over the last 10 years and how the T Shirt sizes have
grown linearly over time! He also announced that the next years Linux
Symposium would be held at Montreal.

Harald who recently won the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award summed
up the event well when he said “It is unique because the key people of
major open source project are in
one place, This helps us be aware of each others progress and learn
from each other”

Linux(TM) needs no introducton these days its become main stream but
the people who make linux happen continue to be more than just
colleagues, they are friends who enjoy and thrive in each others
company. They excel New ideas are formed and implemented when they
meet, this is why a event like OLS is so important for this ecosystem.
The conference for all practical purposes is a open source project in
itself and its maintainers Andrew and Craig need to be hailed for
making such a wonderful event happen. Its projects like OLS which make
Linux and Open Source special.

I initially wrote this article for Live Mint but looks like they had word
limitations and had to chop, so this is the complete version

You can read the published article here

Condemn, Protest… Lunacy

We are all smart people who care about our country and its people. Yet there are very few ways we can express opinion in way that matters. I have always spoken out about things are unfair but is that enough?

What more can i do?
Do i go on streets and protest?
Do i form a group which over time might have some political influence?

At this moment i am not sure, all i know is “If i cant do anything about things like this” then i have no right to cry.

I let “this” happen!

Yahoo Glue: Clued in?

Yahoo recently launched a new feature in search called Yahoo Glue. Yahoo Glue shows search results segregated in different sinks like Yahoo Music, Last.Fm, Wikipedia and Youtube. When i first read about it, i thought this was a kick ass idea. Especially since i was once a avid user of the Firefox plugin Googlepedia which combines google and wikipedia results on a single page. While the over all idea and the implementation seemed quite slick, i discovered a few things which needed to be fixed.

1) Category is more important than source:

For a search engine, category of information is more important than the source of the information (discounting spam). For instance having a box called Last.fm Top tracks makes absolutely no sense in the context of the search request, what makes sense is “Top Tracks” which is the semantic identifier. Same thing holds good for Events, Biography and Videos.

2) Combining results is the prerogative of a search engine:

The first thing i tried when i used this was to check search validness, which is by definition what makes a search engine useful. I searched for “Kenny G”, knowing very well he is playing 2 floors below the Yahoo India office on the 12th of May.

And alas, no listing of the Bangalore event. What makes it even more worse, the event is listed on Upcoming (a yahoo property). This completely destroys the product being
i) Local search
ii) Glue across various sites.

It is imperative for a search engine to parse all kinds of sites and provide the user with a unified view of all that content. If i wanted a distributed search result from each site i would use them individually, the strength of search is the ability to combine them coherently, so i dont have to worry about combining them myself.

I think Events, Videos, Music, Biography, Articles, Talks (numerous others) are tangentials worth pursuing but not at the cost of search quality. The core features of ranking and categorizing need to be spot on for Yahoo Local search to be useful.

Great Indian Developer nomination

I have been nominated for the Great Indian Developer awards in the “Top Committer” category, this is old news but a lot of people have pinged me over the last few days to congratulate me and expressed surprise that i never pimped it on my blog. So well here goes

Vote for me or Naba or GOSUB

There are some very credible Indian contributers on that list, Including Naba who has always been a role model for me and all Gnome developers and users in India.

In the “Collaboration Solution” category, i heartily recommend Zoho Writer, from Advent Net. Zoho has to be one of the best examples of Indian web companies doing innovative and world class products!

In other news, Life goes on as usual, I hacked up a listing of all artists on RadioVeRVe. The page lists in detail bios of all 310 artists we feature on RadioVeRVe. You can check it out here.

26

Here is to one more year of fighting to make a difference!

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep.”
–
Robert Frost

Life is fun

When you have creative, fun and crazy friends

Sub Prime crisis

Vivek pointed me to a great set of slides which explain sub prime crisis. Check them out, it rocks!

Subprime Primer

Got to love accountants and economists. I wonder how some of these people(responsible for the mess) go to bed at night.

Freed.in/2008

I will be speaking at Freed.in on “Independent Music Ecosystem”. All of us at RadioVeRVe have been doing our bit in promoting Independent Music in India. This talk enlists some of the ideas behind RadioVeRVe and the steps forward to build a successful community and eco system around Independent music. If you are in Delhi and want to discuss about Independent music, Please drop in.

I would also love to meet a few Delhi’tes who are involved in making music, especially since i have heard it has an awesome music scene. So drop me comment and we can catch up!

LCD foo

I am thinking of buying a new LCD TV. I am trying to decide between Sony Bravia KLV-32V300 and LG 32LC7R , both seem to have very good ratings on cnet. Any suggestions or input on where one beats the other?