A step forward!

So finally I pulled myself together, formatted and upgraded a PC that was idle (and in such a pathetic state due to viruses) to Vista, installed Visual Studio 2008 code-named ‘Orcas’, Silverlight runtime, tools and SDK as well as ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX extensions and ASP.NET 2.0 Futures, and obtained all the associated documentation, and dubbed the machine ‘devpc’!!! So far I have done a few things with both Silverlight (1.1) and ASP.NET AJAX, but still at chilld’s-play level and learning!

I also installed VS 2005 parallel to my current installation of VS 2003 (I just have never got past that cos many projects were lying on it) on my production machine which is running XP and installed Silverlight (1.0) and ASP.NET AJAX extensions and I am also playing around with that.

The only snag is the monitor on devpc, apparently the drivers for Vista are not in existence for it (it’s a Dell monitor).

All in all… definitely a step in the right direction! I will be doing some LINQ later on today! I have a couple of screencasts and videos to follow as well.

Filed under: fun, laptop, microsoft, OS, research, software, technology

Web 2.0

So what is this thing called ‘Web 2.0′? Well, glad you asked that question; it is an evolution in the way we experience the web, it is a tidal wave that’s taking the web by storm, it’s been around, being discussed in industry circles for a few years but I believe it’s fullness is only beginning to show. Web 2.0 is a concept that came to being from a brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International; it goes back to about 2004 when the first Web 2.0 conference was held.

So what does it mean? Well, according to a paper by Tim O’Reilly (read it here or stream the audio here), Web 2.0 is characterized by a number of principles, that we will get into shortly. One way to learn something is by making clear what something IS NOT and then clarifying what it IS. In this case, what is Web 2.0 NOT and what IS Web 2.0, a simple way of knowing what Web 2.0 is NOT is by looking at it’s ‘predecessor’, ‘Web 1.0′; and this is what is proposed by O’Reilly:
Web 1.0 –>Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication

Though the list is not exhaustive, it does show a significant difference in a sense of what is predominant on the Web as it is in comparison with what was (mostly) familiar, or what predominantly characterized the web in different ways in various areas from before!

According to Tim O’Reilly’s paper, the following are key distinguishing ‘principles’ that are emergent in Web 2.0:

1. The Web As Platform:

‘A Platform Beats an Application Every Time’

Here Tim makes use of 3 examples and some ‘Web 2.0 lessons’ that are evident in them:

Netscape vs. Google: The value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamis of the data it helps to manage.
DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

Akamai vs. BitTorrent: The service automatically gets better the more people use it

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence:

Web 2.0 shows an incredible enhancement in the leveraging of collective intelligence; collection, distribution and sharing as well as finding information and making sense of it. Here, Tim mentions the roles played by Wikipedia ad collective content creation and editing, del.icio.us and Flickr and the concept of folksonomy (a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags.) and others, especially blogging, RSS and sites such as bloglines that aggregate RSS content and Permalink.

3. Data is the Next Intel Inside:

The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

4. End of the Software Release Cycle:

Here, Tim O’Reilly takes notice of some key aspects that Web 2.0 companies have to embrace in their business/software development models. He claims:

Operations must become a core competency. Google‘s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis.

And

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It’s no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a “Beta” logo for years at a time… Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency.

5. Lightweight Programming Models:

Simplicity is the name of the new game!

A case in point being RSS and REST (Representational State Transfer)! Tim O’Reilly clearly notes the following key aspects of the Web 2.0 era in this regard:

Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems… The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset!

Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection… the end-to-end principle

Design for “hackability” and remixability.

6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device:

According to Dave Stutz, “Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.”

7. Rich User Experiences:

One word: Silverlight! and another word, Popfly

So, really, Web 2.0 is a paradigm shift in the way we look at the web, the way we get information from the web, the way we find information on the web, the way we develop the web, the way we build business models around the web!

Filed under: blog, content, cool, feed, google, information retrieval, microsoft, research, search, SOA, software, yahoo

Local Innovation for the Stock Market

A friend of mine has a start-up and they just launched a product to assist stock traders at the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE). It’s a tool you can use to get analytics on the different companies listed on the NSE to avoid speculative investment in stocks. Here is a word from Tony, part of the team that created StocksPartner!

Do you invest at the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) and have problems keeping track of share price movement?

I am pleased to announce the availability of a new stocks analytics tool for the NSE that will be of enormous help at www.stockspartner.com!

Its called Stocks Partner 2007 and I think you should use it too. It’s software for tracking price movement on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. Instead of having to go to a website or your email to download daily price lists, just run it. It keeps track of the same information graphically.

The software has these features
. Easy to use
. Easily Analyze Trends
. Easy comparisons
. Get information fast and easy
. Quick Automatic Updates
. Graphing facilities
. Auto verify to ensure graphs are correct
. Update from anywhere

Download a FREE copy from www.stockspartner.com today. You’ll love it.

Cheers
Anthony Shikali

Filed under: cool, kenya, software

Beowulfing Locality

Its been a crazy weekend! I fell really ill from Friday night! i didnt even go to work yesterday, I had to stay in bed fighting off a terrible cold, but i am much better now! Anyway, on to more interesting stuff (anything could possibly be more interesting than a story about my struggle against the common cold!)

Locality of reference (and i am thinking aimlessly on this); for some reason I have been mulling around this subject, though not strictly in the proper CS manner. It’s interesting how it seems that almost all that we discover and implement in science and tech is an already existent reality in nature. You know how they say that lightning does not strike in one place twice? I bet someone could come up with a proof of that based on locality of reference. I watched this video from microsoft research recently about some research they are doing into new ways of implementing concurrency in OSs. One of the guys gave a very interesting illustration; he said that what’s been happening with current implementations of concurrency is synonimous to building a structure with banana peels, you can get really good engineers to do it; and they could probably do it very well but principally building a structure with banana peels is not an ideal situation! There is also an interesting paper by Rob Pike I read about how systems software research can possibly be considered irrelevant today!!! Check it out, it’s a really good read!

There is something i came across recently while researching on the use of commodity PCs to build powerful clusters with immense computing power. You know, the same thing they do over at google with racks of commodity PCs strung together and kept humming by custom software! They call it a Beowulf cluster. The name apparently comes from some old epic. The aim is to get more computing power per unit at less cost, leveraging commodity PCs by clustering them and spending less, instead of buying a huge server that will give you less comparative computing power at a more expensive price… The major issues are of course cooling (I have always wondered how much Google spends per year on just cooling expenses) and fail-over, from what I have read, since PCs are constantly failing within the Google clusters, the architecture makes it such that when one PC crushes another automatically takes over.

Filed under: google, research, software, technology

A Special Night

The last couple of dys have been a bit busy. Following up on my previous post, i did some more reporting with SSRS(That tutorial is still in the pipeline) and I also got a taste of some new things here and there as well as experiencially learning the DOs and DONTs of SSRS. SSRS is a great tool, the only thing i do not quite fancy is the way you have to tweek the report a lot just to get the right print out (and big-up to all those nice folks at MS who worked on it!). For example, there is this interesting thing that started happening with the report i built; on the client machine they would navigate to a page say 221 but oddly when they preview the print-out it would show a page or two ahead (like 222). I have not managed to track whats up with that but i gave the users a simple work-around that suffices.

Other than that I have as usual been doing a lot of work on data and some interesting reports, i did one this afternoon that almost had me jumping up and down in blissful glee.

Other than that, I have been watching all these videos about interesting stuff at microsoft research, stuff to fo with CLR research, an interesting item called DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) that they are doing with Ruby (I really ought to learn Ruby!), F# and Functional Programming, LINQ (very interesting, Anders is pretty good), Silverlight, Programming Language development  and some more stuff, but mostly CLR.

Frankly, a lot has been said about Microsoft, but I think they have some great work going on there and they work on pretty interesting stuff (but i still think Google totally rocks).

I am sure the title of this post has some eye-lids up in curiosity… so I will just leave it like that… for now!!!

Filed under: cool, fun, google, googler, interview, microsoft, research, software, technology, work

Back 2 the Basics!

Yep. That’s what i intend to do, get back to the basics. I have always considered myself a software person (I refuse to say ‘Software NERD!!!’). Sure, I have met a great many people who I really, really, I mean really respect for their great mastery of the software engineering field, and I consider myself pretty much a toddler at it, but growing and developing steadily. However, for some reason and due to circumstance, I have sort of drifted into the world of data and data mining, which I find I have a knack for, I find patterns in data quite easily and it has proven to be a really good asset at work anyway! What I feel I need to do is get back to software and develop that art seriously! After all I consider it my mainstay. It’s a shame there aren’t many very serious software engineering firms in Kenya!

One Warrior!

Filed under: software