I am right now in Microsoft Project “Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.

Notes from the session:

• “Velocity” is Microsoft's Distributed Cache .
• Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data (Flight Seat Inventory and like)
• It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
• Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
• Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
• Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
• Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost. High Availability (HA) is ensured
• Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
• In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.

You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity blog post here .

With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they ship this and not go the previous paths.

This was by far the best session for me in PDC2008. It was SQL Server: Database to Data Platform - Road from Server to Devices to the Cloud by David Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and SQL Server guru. David was brilliant, you could clearly see and appreciate his deep expertise on the subject. He gave an overall view of what's happening with Database in the last few decades, how you can write very complex huge data applications today easily. And then he talked about where this SQL on cloud fits in, where it doesn't and so on. You can see two brief demos shown in the talk below.

David Campbell talking about Sync in Action with Sync Framework in the talk

Zach Skyles Owens of Microsoft showing the Trey Research Demo application

If you want to catch up fully on what David talked about here, you can watch this video he did few weeks before PDC2008 covering the same topic - I highly recommend you watching this.

You can see the photos I took from here.

Ray Ozzie

• For the last few years, the scope of enterprise applications are increasing. IT departments have to manage more of outside users (their customers) than their internal users
• More of IT Pros and Developers have to work together and learn together in this new cloud world
• More than ever the web site of an enterprise is critical to the overall business health
• Hat's off to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for the phenomenal work they are doing with EC2 and Windows hosting. In ways we collaborate with them and in other ways we compete with them
• Today this cloud is another tier. The first tier is your PC or Mobile, it is all about you. The second tier is the enterprise and its scope is the size of the enterprise. The third tier is this cloud. To do this we had a team headed by David Cutler, Amitabh Srivatsa and others in Microsoft
• Today's systems whether it is Windows, Java or others are all modelled for scale-up. We need for the next 50 years, we need something that can scale out & parallel computing
• We announce today "Windows Azure". It is our new Windows (new OS) that supports all the infrastructure to power this cloud design. It is not a software, but a service that is running on Microsoft Datacenters, initially in USA then to be rolled out worldwide
• It will be the most environmentally sensitive, scalable, reliable service for all Microsoft hosting over the years
• Windows Azure works with the same tools - VB.NET 2008, C#, C++, .NET, etc. including both managed and un-managed code. Initially managed will be supported and later support for un-managed will be introduced
• There was a demo of a new services, a Mobile Phone discovery in neighbourhood using Bluetooth - bluehoo.com and client can be downloaded from m.bluehoo.com

Note: For the first time I saw Microsoft keynote speakers (Ray Ozzie and Amitabh Srivatsa) in a developer conference not wearing T-Shirts but are in formal attire with a blazer.  

Ray Ozzie's closing notes video below:

Bob Muglia

• There was demo of using .NET Services and SQL Services by RedPrairie and also of System Management "Atlanta". Atlanta uses SQL Services for customers to compare their instrumentation data with others and best practices
• This week we are releasing "Oslo" a new modelling tool and a language "m"

Dave Thomson

• Vice President of Microsoft Online, he has headed the team that developed Active Directory and in Exchange Server
• One of the problems to solve is federated identity. This is done by using Microsoft Services Connector which sites on-premises and then syncs it to the online cloud. This is currently used by Microsoft online services and will be the same used by Windows Azure.

I have been using as my primary laptop a Macbook Air running (obviously) Windows Vista for last six months. Everything is great with the laptop - the lightweight and the very cool design. There are only three things I don't like in this laptop: No right mouse button, Only one USB port, Problem with Wake up after sleep. The first two I can't do anything about, but the last one I can try to fix by a driver update. A check in Apple site didn't show up any updates for Bootcamp for Vista. Then looking into Device Manager I realized the graphics card in Macbook Air is Intel Mobile 965 Express, so going to Intel support site I downloaded the latest update: Mobile Intel® 965 Express Chipset Family Ver.# 15.11.3.1576 Date: Oct 11, 2008 for Windows Vista 32

Installing this, solved my wake up problems. If you have a Macbook Air, running Windows Vista and having problems with the machine coming up after sleep, I highly recommend this upgrade.

Today I got a chance to visit Cray Inc. (The supercomputer company) headquarters in downtown Seattle. I got to see in their lab the recently arrived Cray CX1 Supercomputer. This is the first product to be made after the partnership between Cray, Intel and Microsoft to bring the benefits of High Performance computing to desktops. This is a cool (with Cray's patented cooling systems and low decibel noise) computer that you can put it under your desk (or as a Cray engineer said on top of the desk to show the world you have a Cray machine) and run demanding applications without a datacenter.

The machine sports state of the art specifications of Up to Eight Blades per Chassis and in each chassis - Single or Dual Intel Quad-Core Xeons (overall upto 16 Quad Core Xeons), 64GB per Blade (or Node) and so on.

The basic chassis costs about $8000 and an average configuration including few compute, storage and graphics nodes costs between $25,000 to $60,000. Not that expensive for owning a supercomputer. The part I love is that it runs Windows HPC 2008 and the front-display panel sports a Windows CE for showing the status.

I wish I can get one of our media customers to pay for this and then we can deploy their web servers onto this!

India has successfully launched its first spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 today. With the launch, India joined the elite club nations -- USA, Russia, European Space Agency, China and Japan. It is definitely a huge step for India's space ambitions. ISRO had announced a week back that they will do it today (October 22) I was hoping  in particular they do it today, which happens to be my birthday!

As a surprise, I got a call from Radio Mirchi RJ "Anjana" about my purchase of land in Moon for my wife. I told her I did it because I thought it was a cool idea - a novelty. At the same time, listeners should be aware that there is currently no real value or legal framework for buying lands in Moon today, so this is a not an investment for future. 

I am in Bay Area, USA for 2 weeks which will take me to Silicon Valley, Redmond (WA) and Los Angeles (for Microsoft PDC '08). Sunday evening I went along with my cousin who lives here to Fremont Temple. This is a well maintained and spacious (considering it is outside India) temple and I was impressed by the newly build area for the south indian gods.

On Monday morning I went to the Intel Museum in their campus in Santa Clara (CA). The museum covers about the history of Intel from memory chips, 4004 to the latest chips; chip fabrication process and basics of silicon, etc. The self visit doesn't take more than 30 minutes and I will recommend visiting this only if you happen to be in Silicon Valley area. Not worth travelling from anywhere far for this. I was told most of this is available online in their website as well.

Seeing the Intel 386 PC on display brought old memories for me. I started learning and doing extensive programming first on this PC - a 386SX (without the math co-processor) computer from Wipro during my school days. It is on this PC I learned my first business programming language - FoxBase and then Clipper. It is amazing the progress we have had in terms of speed and features over the last 23 years - unbelievable.

Today Indian Stock exchange lost its recovery from earlier the week to below 10,000 and closing at 4-digit marks. I was curious on how this journey was, so I downloaded the data for last 10-years from Yahoo! India finance and plotted the below chart. It was interesting to see:

• It took nearly 2 years for it to climb from 10,000 (7/Feb/2006) to 20,000 (26/Dec/2007)
• The downward from 20,000 (15/Jan/2008) to below 10,000 (17/Oct/2008) was over 9 months 
• Ten years before from today SENSEX was at just 2848.11 (16/Oct/1998) which is still 3.5 times from today's value

Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature "Geode". Geode is about browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide appropriate location based information. Though Location-aware applications are present in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort to do something similar on the PCs.

Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods - GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi. It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose hybrid positioning system (XPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. Click on the video below to see how it works - basically they are building huge database of Wi-Fi access points and correlating them with Latitude/Longitude information from other sources like GPS for each access point profiled.

All these are transparent to developers and users, for developers it is just a Javascript call like the one shown below:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
  alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})

Before these initiatives web applications were limited to deducing user's location based on your IP. Technology is not standing still with IP based deduction, earlier they were limited to US cities, now database are more complete and are able to identify cities world over including India.

Related links: ZoneInfo database, GeoNames

Before I proceed let me state my position on this topic: I am not against Open-Source Software, at the same time I I believe like all other literary (creative) & engineering works software too needs to be based on a sound viable commercial model.

I came across this video of Stephen Fry celebrating 25 years of GNU and introducing "Free" Software. Being an award winning broadcasting professional Mr.Fry has done a great job of delivering a simple yet powerful message on what he believes on. But his introduction to "Free" Software and especially his plumbing analogy to be incorrect and can misguide general public. (Please see the video below before continuing)

Why?. He says just like you can change the plumbing in your house any way you want, "free" software allows you to change your computer the way you want it. Operating System vendors like Microsoft prevent you from doing this. Nothing can be far from truth.

All software vendors including Microsoft, Adobe or Apple have never placed any restrictions on how you can use your computers or on what applications you can write on top of them. The licensing comes when you want to change the core of their work (operating systems or software written by them) and then redistribute that resulting work. Going back to the plumbing analogy (which is a bad pick by Mr.Fry) this is like you wanting to cast your own steel pipes in a furnace and for doing it you want the pipe vendors to share their blue-prints and chemical composition "Free". Of course, there is nothing wrong in you wanting to do your own steel pipes if you want to, similarly no one prevents you (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple) from writing your own operating systems.

My whole point is it relevant for the masses, is it necessary?. I feel there are more pressing problems that can be attempted in the applications space, in the industry domains where the scarce human creative energies can be used on. Not on writing yet another Operating System, yet another UNIX/LINUX, yet another MS Office clone and so on - which is precisely what GNU has done.  To see this clearly you don't need to look far - just look at the number of Linux Distros that are out there.

In terms of software licensing if it is all about "Freedom" as GNU claims it to be, then my pick is always BSD style licensing over GNU. The difference being that GNU is of viral nature, meaning any resulting work needs to be GNU licensed, whereas BSD licensing doesn't put any such restrictions - you can do pretty much whatever you want.

While driving in the Chennai rains over the last two days this fact struck me. In most areas of Chennai there are hardly any road signs:

- No Pedestrian/Zebra Crossing marks on the road. This gives a good excuse for people to cross wherever they wish, and absence of X Crossings makes it difficult for drivers to identify crossings and slow-down.

- No lane markings, no Yellow/White lines in middle of the road. This makes it convenient for two-wheelers and three-wheelers to go on the opposite side and block the incoming traffic, again not that the lines will cure this but it can be a good start

- No uniform street name signs. Today you are lucky if you can spot a street name sign especially if you are in crowded market areas. Having US style street name boards at an height visible while driving will be useful, they also serve as good platform for future to host CCTV for surveillance.

For all this, the money can come from advertisement and sponsorship. I feel PPP (Public Private Partnership) here will work great.

Is anyone from Chennai Corporation of Tamilnadu government, listening this?

Few months when the Petrol/Diesel shortage happened in India I decided I will buy an electric two-wheeler. Apart from the advantage of driving when Oil is scarce, I thought it will also give a personal satisfaction of being environment friendly. Of course, nothing is more "Green" than a bi-cycle. So about a month and half back I purchased the Ultra Velociti - an electric powered scooter. It runs only on Electricity with no Oil at all, the dealer claims there is nothing to maintain or service in the vehicle other than periodic Tyre Air-Pressure and Battery check.

Specifications of the scooter (* Under Standard Test conditions and a payload of 75 Kg):

• Speed    45 Km/ Hour*
• Range    50 Km/ Charge* (Each full charge takes about 6 hours)
• Vehicle weight    88 Kg

The only dealer I could find in Chennai when I searched was GEE GEE Motors in Royapuram, but they were willing to come down and give a test drive in my office. The scooter on road including Road Tax, Registration & Insurance costs about Rs.41,000/-. After paying the full money I had to wait for nearly 2 weeks before I got the vehicle complete with registration and Number - I don't like to drive vehicles without number and insurance.

Having been driving only a car for last several years, when this scooter arrived it was a experience of "Freedom" for me. I was able to go for local shopping in crowded market streets in West Mambalam & T.Nagar easily, without having to worry about parking and traffic. When I am driving this scooter and see the vehicles next to me I feel good that I am not polluting and I am spending negligible money for driving. Though the manual says maximum load is 120Kgs, I was able to ride it myself with my wife and kid comfortably - obviously a bit slower than riding it alone, but nevertheless you can. The one problem I faced was of charge, the power meter is unreliable - from full, once it drops to half it takes only few minutes to drop to zero. While it is in this region, it runs in kind of a stop-n-go motion. But this was because I didn't charge for over a week (though I didn't drive more than few kilometres as well), but it will be a wise idea to charge it every few days once - to avoid this problem.

 
(You can see the charger in the left picture, the other end can be plugged to any 5V socket; The Power-meter and Speedometer in the picture on right)

Overall I found it to be a great second vehicle. Can it be the only one?, I doubt. I feel the technology, power of the motor and the engineering have to undergo one or two more iterations before the first time two-wheeler purchaser can go for this, selecting this over a motorbike. 

Reference: GEE GEE MOTORS, 73, Mannarsamy Koil Street, Royapuram, Chennai.Phone: 044-43528008, 43528009

The recent issue of IEEE ITPro Magazine (July/August 2008) had carried a very interesting Editorial. It raised the question "A Moving Target: Try to Define the IT Workforce", where it pointed that job titles in IT industry were being invented and qualifications were shifting daily. It uses the US Bureau of Labor's List of IT Jobs and arrives at a suggestion of a short list of 3 distinct "identities" in IT today:

1. computer scientist
2. software engineer, and
3. IT Professional

In the above list probably it is easier to understand "IT Professionals" as a broad designation. And the other two as niches within that.

The authors Keith W.Miller and Jeffrey Voas clarifies those two roles in detail as "Both software engineer(s) and computer scientist(s) think of software artifacts as means to ends, but those ends are distinctive. A computer scientists sees the artifact as an object of study, a source of experiments and data to analyze.  A software engineer sees the artifact as a tool to accomplish a customer goal, a method to solve a practical problem. Both could be interested in exactly the same piece of software - perhaps even the same aspect of it - but their goals will likely be quite different". 

You can read the full article from here (for short time only unless you are a member) from IEEE IT PRO - JULY/AUGUST 2008