From New York Times, November 26, 1991:

DOS computers, made by I.B.M., Compaq, Tandy and about a million other companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans will note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not connote a higher life form. There is strength in numbers, however. The White House uses DOS computers.

Microblogging seems to be the rage these days, so I was looking at Indian alternatives to Twitter, and I found Webaroo Gupshup (later I realized that I had already received an invite but hadn’t paid attention to it).

Gupshup seems to hit the sweet spot in the Indian context because its all about sms and mobile phones and combines it with the web. For example, you can start your own group and update your microblog via sms, and it’ll be automatically forwarded (as sms) to all those who subscribe to your channel. The posts are also available on a webpage. The added viral/social features are the ability to conduct your own polls or quizzes and even ratings.

I signed up for Gupshup and created my own microblog located at http://sms.webaroo.com/channels/Swaroop.

This got me thinking how people actually promote their microblog, and it turns out that one of the important things is a widget on their blog that points to the microblog, especially the Twitter badge.

So, I was looking for a widget for Gupshup as well but couldn’t find one. Why not write one myself?

It seemed pretty easy to create it using Flex because Gupshup now has RSS feeds. And just a hour and half of tinkering got me to create this:

(more…)

My laptop at work has some network configuration issue (I think) leading to Outlook not finding the server - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But every other application uses the internet/intranet just fine. Only Outlook doesn’t work and I’m tired of reading the mails from a web interface because it is painfully slow and more so for high traffic mailing lists.

So, I switched on my desktop (which has only Kubuntu installed and no Windows), ran apt-get install evolution and apt-get install evolution-exchange commands, started Evolution, added a new Microsoft Exchange account and it started downloading all the messages.

It’s ironic that I have to use a Linux machine to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Maybe now I can get my laptop fixed by our IS. The last time I reported the same problem, they deleted my profile and added it again and I had to spend an entire day customizing my setup again, and the original problem still wasn’t fixed. I don’t want to go through that trouble again…

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Beryl makes using Linux so much more fun. The Expose-like preview of windows (F8 key) is very useful.

Update: It’s not over til it’s over.

Update 2: Well, Evolution is locally caching the mail, all I have to do is to leave it on overnight :), well that mitigates my email reading issues a lot, assuming it keeps working that way.

Update 3 on 2007-06-13 Wed 04:07 PM: Finally solved the mystery of Outlook not working… it was because of the Sify Broadband software installed! Renaming all the Sify-related exes to some other extension fixed the issue. Go figure!

$150,000. That’s what’s in a name. That’s how much Microsoft paid for the name “Zune”:

According to Boslet, Placek cited several other reasons for zeroing in on “Zune”:

• It’s a short word, reflecting the gadget’s small size.
• It has a familiar sound. “‘From tune to zune’ was the expression some inside Lexicon used,” the Journal reports.
• The letter “U” has “a full sound” and “makes one think there is a lot packed into a little word– and product.”

So I searched for the Lexicon Branding company that came up with this name:

“The Lexicon Research Network of 60 Ph.D. linguists in 39 countries was tapped to provide insights into the latest brands in music and video entertainment and to give us suggestions as to words, word parts, sounds and metaphors that might be applied to a ‘next generation entertainment system” — from an SFGate article

It seemed strange to me that they get paid so much for just coming up with a name. But guess what other names they have come up with in the past:

• Pentium
• Powerbook
• Blackberry

Heh, so naming does matter… recently there was an internal call for suggestion of code names for the next version of Flex, and one of the names I had suggested was finally voted as the official code name! I guess you will hear this name in the press articles on Adobe Flex soon.

Wanting to do something different, yesterday I made a short dash (if you can call a 12-hour bus journey a ‘dash’…) to Hyderabad to visit an ex-yahoo colleague Kiran as well as a few other friends. And I visited the Microsoft campus

What’s the first thing I saw? People playing cricket in Microsoft’s own cricket ground in their campus.

(more…)

Interestingly, Sriram just made the 1,000th comment on my blog.

Btw, Sriram joined Microsoft last month (in Hyderabad) as a PM in the DevTools team.

To Sriram : blogs.msdn.com/sriramk doesn’t seem to be taken yet

About a year ago, I had presented my 8th semester presentation on Xen, now called C Omega. It is a language that combines SQL, XML and OOP into one tight language. The paper that proposed this language was named Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles. The circle represents the encapsulation behavior of objects and OOP, the triangle represents the tree structure of the XML and the rectangle represents the tabular structure of databases.

I recently came across Anders Hejlsberg’s interview on Channel 9 regarding programming data in C# 3.0 and it looks like C-Omega is going to be ‘merged’ into 3.0. Its amazing that MS has taken this concept (which seemed totally radical to me when I first read about it) to production quality and is actually going to make this a core part of their platform.

Let us consider an example of using C-Omega. Suppose you want to handle books in a program used to manage libraries. Then you could write a book class using C-Omega as

[code] public class book { sequence { string title; choice { sequence{ editor editor; }+; sequence{ author author; }+; } string publisher; int price; } attribute int year; }
[/code]

The cool part is that the above same class can be used to store the data either as XML or in a relational database. You can also instantiate an object using XML syntax:

[code] book b = SwaroopC H www.byteofpython.info 250 ; [/code]

Note that this syntax is still static typing. Needless to say, the C-Omega compiler must be one heck of a monster.

The Python connection is that the C-Omega-ish method of access will probably be included into IronPython at some stage. Even if that doesn’t happen, we already have Pythonic ways of doing XML as pointed out long ago by wspace.

If you have ever written a program that uses databases, I highly recommend reading the Circles, Triangles and Rectangles paper. It just might change the way you think about databases and SQL, or even XML for that matter.

You can also download that old presentation of mine on Xen.

… by hiring the top guy into your company and then cut off all incentives for the community to get interested.

Yes, I’m talking about IronPython and in this case, the company happens to be MS.

Read what Edd Dumbill has to say about it, especially this part:

Third-party patches won’t be considered until after the 1.0 release. Hugunin encourages people to be involved, but only in filing good bug reports and feature requests. And when doing this involves a .NET passport, and using the GotDotNet web forums rather than good old mailing lists, it’s a bit of a disincentive. Added to that, there’s some uncertainty about the freeness of IronPython’s license. While it looks free, it’s got the same name, “Shared Source”, as several Microsoft licenses that definitely are not free.

I have nothing more to say except that such an awesome ‘open source’ project has been effectively killed off - IronPython may go on to become 1.0 but it is now reduced to a one-man show when so many people could have contributed to it.

Should Yahoo! open up its messenger protocol? Does Google really follow its ‘Do no evil’ philosophy? Should government and public data be allowed to be handled by proprietary software? Is open source the solution always? Is using non-freedom software detrimental? The big debate is here.

Good to hear that Sun is finally serious about dynamic languages on Java. It’s no secret that I don’t like Java. I don’t want to start a holy war here - it’s just simply my personal preference, I don’t like the ’smell’ and ‘feel’ of it. But it would be great to write stuff in Python and get it running on top of the Java platform. That would surely be good for everybody. It would make more sense if all the big corporates also tried using Jython or Groovy - it would lead to much happier and saner programmers and better products as well. Oh, and it’ll run on the Java platform.

Then again, I agree with Dumbill that the lack of activity on IronPython is discomforting.

Btw, don’t forget to read that first link - It must’ve been awesome to have Larry Wall (creator of Perl), Guido van Rossum (creator of Python), Dan Sugalski (Parrot) and Samuele Pedroni (Jython), James Strachan (Groovy) all in the same room and discussing dynamic languages!