shyam's blog

James Hamilton has written previously on the inefficiency of blade servers on his blog, which focused more on the cooling/power/floor space equation. Equally important is the application deployment side of blade servers, which is, again, not as efficient as the vendors would like you to believe. And I am going to state some of the reasons why:

There has been a subtle change going on in the Ajaxified websites of late, with a lot of them sporting the # in their URLs, like how named anchors work on a page.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox (Gmail Inbox)

https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/11e3fbb02a77e5cc7 (Gmail message tagged 'inbox')

https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#sent (Gmail sent mail folder)

http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Home.aspx (Orkut main page)

http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Scrapbook.aspx?rl=ms (Orkut scrapbook)

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=510934229&ref=profile (Facebook profile page link from home page)

http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn#/friends/?id=510934229&flid=0&view=status&q=&nt=0&nk=0&s=0&st=0 (Facebook 'All Friends' page)

The reason for the change is very simple: One of the casualties of the takeover of Ajax on the web has been the breakage of the 'back' and 'forward' buttons in browsers.

With this very simple change, those buttons now work again.

And that is all there is to it!

Prior Art:

Really Simple History

A Better Ajax Back Button Solution

AJAX

Google Gears was developed to introduce a new breed of functionality into existing web browsers, enabling them to locally store and sync resources, store and sync structured data, all without locking up the browser. Some of the Gears-enabled websites are: Google Reader, Google Docs and Wordpress, that allow the user to take advantage of the above features.

While most of the current use cases of Gears attempt to address only the offline access and syncing part of the offering, there is a possible use case for Gears that has not been fully exploited yet. You can easily use Google Gears for distributed computing too. I am just surprised that we have not seen any such project on the horizon yet.

To do distributed computing with Gears, the enabled website becomes the master node that would break down the task into chunks the nodes can handle. The master node would also maintain chunk status as assigned to nodes, marking each chunk as in-progress, unprocessed and processed.

At the client end, each node can download a chunk or a group of chunks and process them in the background. If the client is in the offline mode, it can wait till it gets to be online again and sync up with the master server. This does imply that there is the potential for a lot of wasted processing if clients wind up being frequently online, but any distributed computing application will assume degrees of wasted cycles.

It is always a good experience to step away from your regular circle and meet people outside of your comfort zone.

I had such an experience a couple of days ago, meeting someone from the Hindi media segment, who currently runs a business that caters to the multimedia needs of mostly rural politicians.

While we were on the subject of when the general elections are likely to be announced he said one rather curious thing:

"If the Congress is smart, it will announce the elections in February, than later."

I was kind of amused by the statement, because it flies in the face of the current wisdom to not take the recent Assembly election results as an indicator of the possible General election outcome in 2009.

And he had an equally interesting rationale to the argument, which was that anti-incumbency is closely tied to weather and other interesting factors.

He said that anti-incumbency is highest when the weather is hot and people are irritable.

Keeping that in mind, February has absolutely gorgeous weather, which gets people in a really nice mindset, reminding them of all the good things in life than the negative ones.

Who would have thought that?

In these troubled times, we should not forget the good times we have had during build up to the burst of Bubble 2.0.

There are many fond memories, plans and grand dreams that marked it.

I am paying my tribute to all of those with a song titled, We Shall Monetize, since monetization has been THE hope that kept the dream alive, and killed it too, in the end.

Please sing along to the tune of 'We Shall Overcome'.
We shall monetize
We shall monetize, we shall monetize
We shall monetize some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall monetize some day

Advertising will see us through, subscriptions will see us through
Some sucker will see us through some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
The exit will meet us some day

We will be on to an IPO, we will be on to an IPO
We will be on to an IPO some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We will be on to an IPO some day

We will merge with a stronger brand, we’ll walk hand in hand
We will merge with a stronger brand some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We will merge with a stronger brand some day

We are not afraid, we are not afraid
We are not afraid today
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We are not afraid today

The hype shall make us free, the hype shall make us free
The hype shall make us free some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
The hype shall make us free some day

They shall overvalue in peace,
They shall overvalue in peace
They shall overvalue in peace some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
They shall overvalue in peace some day