UI copyrights & the brave world of tomorrow

The some Chinese developers were in the news as they released a Ubuntu based system which worked like Windows XP. My thoughts were as to to what extent can one extend copyrights to UI design? I don't think so. I did a little bit of searching but could not find anything to this effect. I am under the impression that copyrights can be extended to software for a particular functionality.

Windows XP theme for Ubuntu has been around for a long time and so is Mac OS & Windows 7. If I customize my machine to look like another OS does it mean I am violating the copyrights?

User friendly software and good functionality have helped spread IT. If it were not for MP3, do you think online music would have proliferated as much as it has? Many companies released their personal file formats but MP3 is most expected as it is open and easily shared.

With everyone going into cost cutting measures, its a matter of time that companies force employees to switch to open source OS & software. Firefox has gained recognition as a better browser. Ubuntu and Redhat the same set of security features as Windows and many come with official support. Microsoft is going to have to work harder for its share of the market.

Social Network Analysis and Community Manager

Two key learnings for this week.

First one is 'Social Network Analysis', this is analyzing Social networks to understand working relationships in their organization. Companies also want to analyze social network data to understand whom to approach for maximum gains. Also this can serve as inputs to engineering on expected features in a product.
Still in the nascent stage regarding how the network is to be analyzed. Tools are evolving to deliver better results. I think a key requirements in this is search tools to go through the amazing size of data available at their disposal.

Second one is the emergence of a new role in IT companies, Community Manager. This person manages the sharing of information with open source communities. Also how open source can be leveraged to provide maximum gains to the company. Now this is a role I would love to work as. I am sure I have pretty good knowledge of open source tools.

Virtualization to accelerate dev environment setup

My team works on several projects at the same time on different versions of the same product. It takes us almost a day to setup the product and source base. If we have a 2 GB RAM more, this process can be accelerated by system virtualization.

I would recommend maintaining virtualized images for dev environments on different product versions. This can use a Linux OS to minimize license costs. Virtualization environments like Sun Virtual Box are also available for free. Application along with database would be setup and readily available. The source code would be setup and available in Eclipse. There would be a need to maintain several such images thus enhanced storage but the effort savings would be worth it.

I am sure others too have thought of treading this path but IT practices seldom change. Business look at IT to improve business efficiency. On the other hand, CXOs are usually unwilling to use new technology to enhance IT efficiency. Is this not hypocrisy?

Please don't hurt the country... use open standards

Please don't hurt the web
Originally uploaded by Roebot

It seems there is a debate going on to implement open standards for e-Governance projects expecially the multi-crore Unique Identity Card (UIC) headed by Nandan N. Read more about it here.

In fact recently EVMs bugs were disclosed. The Indian opposition raised an outcry to revert back to paper voting. If it followed open standards, I am sure people would have provided a patch/ solution within a short time.

I have a belief that in view of transparency of government operations all transactions & data should adopt open standards. This will also ensure government cannot be held hostage to a vendor to use only their services.

This needs to encompass long term storage solutions, documentation, system integration, inter institutional transactions, EVMs - voting machines.

Due to their past experiences, many cities have adopted open standards and Linux operating system. A famous example of this is the city of Munich, Germany. India should learn from these.

Cutting cost at the data center

I guess the biggest issue with most data centers is cutting its cost. The main idea behind this would be to maximize utilization, shutdown hardware which is not necessary.

We need a mechanism in database & applications to run in a minimal mode. I would say the entry interfae for any application (web or otherwise) would be its login function. Databases and application servers should have the capability to run in minimal/ login mode. No need to keep a large chunk of database in memory, just keep the login fraction. As soon as someone logs in, it triggers other tables/ functions to load.

Same goes with application server, the application should load and run only the login interface. Rest of the modules should be loaded once a user logs in. Other objects/ modules should not be anywhere in memory.

In order to do this, server need to have a combination of old fashioned hard disks (HDD) and a solid state storage (SDD). Fetching data from SDD definitely faster than HDD so OS should store data should SDD where as raw data should be stored in HDD.

I guess this will add another layer of memory to a complicated system but such passive data writes will keep only bare minimum OS & hardware components working. Thus saving electricity.

Mighty fall continues

This is in continuation from my pervious post "How the mighty have fallen". It seems the fall of Infosys continues. They have continue harassing employees while the management prospers.

It seems the IT people are being asked to take BPO jobs. This is very disgusting and not in tune with their skills. Read more here.

Looking at this in light of recent hikes (~10 crores) given to higher management (read here). With these 10 crores, the 2K people sacked could have easily been retained. If their conditions are so bad why are upper echolons getting raises while others aren't??

It is unethical and shameful for Infosys to fall to such lows.

How the mighty have fallen

This is about Infosys, once considered the most employee friendly company has fired few thousand people in India on pretext of under-performance. This does not include people it fired all over the globe and others it forced to find jobs elsewhere.

I was part of Infosys a few months ago and I have been noticing the changes since 2004. Infosys prides itself on having a well oiled entry process. It is considered easier to get into Harvard as compared to Infosys. Then how is it that under-performers manage to get in. How can someone subvert the rigorous entry process?

Is it possible for a company to consistently grow profits at 30% irrespective of its size ie 10 million, 100 million or 1 billion in revenues. 29% growth in profits on ~25 to 30 % operating margin means approx 1 billion US$ in profits per year. If they are makign a billion dollars year, the salaries of 2000 Indian employees is unlikely to dent their profits significantly.

It seems Google too has reached the end of its winning streak. All we can do is hope for he best of the IT industry. A recent Dilbert comic says it all.

Is the time of RDBMS up?

Watch that tape spin
Originally uploaded by PeterForret

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) have been around for quiet sometime. They came evolved the need to segregate flat file data into logical groups. Thus providing efficient storage and better search and query capabilities.

With the recent improvements in search tools and cloud based storage. Document Database management systems are gaining ground. All you have to do is create a logical document, ie. data populated in a group of fields. With the advances in search tools/ algorithms. You need not maintain referential integrity. Just save the document and run free text search tools to fetch necessary data.

With cloud technology gathering, large document databases can be maintained on several large clusters.

Its a way this is funny. First we had large mainframes where everythig was maintained in a flat file. Then we had relational databases where we split everything into denormalized tables. With documents DB we are going back to flat file storage.

This is very similar to the lotus notes technology being developed by IBM. RDBMS will continue for the simple reason that these can be quickly installed and maintained on standalone machines. We need to wait and watch how soon enterprises adopt this technology.

Juxtaposition

An employee can be unhappy for any number of reasons; pay, designation, quality of work etc. Today's businesses are inherently dependent on IT. In such a scenario can the IT admin/ support staff be kept unhappy? He can hold business at ransom by disrupting services during peak business hours.

Business may not understand technical matters. In order to cut costs they may have bought sub-standard equipment which would fail often. Its ITs job to keep these operational but expecting 99% uptime on such applications/ servers would be far fetched.

Business executives can also blame the IT team responsible for impacting business in order to tide over a business slump.

What would be the best way to resolve a conflict between business and IT? In a cases where the business IT relationship has deteriorated would it be possible to rebuild trust and get both these fuctions working towards a common goal!

CEOs are supposed to resolve such conflicts but are today's CEO capable to tide differences between COO, CFO & CIO? With the number of sub-groups and more CxO positions , organizations will surely need a CRO (Chief Relationship Officer) or CNO (Chief Negotation Officer) to resolve conflicts between sub-groups.

Everyone wants to be on Cloud 9

The latest buzz in IT is cloud computing. Every product and application wants to move to the 'cloud'. They fail to understand that moving to the cloud requires serious restructuring of the product/ application.

Technical: Applications have to be made SOA compliant. All components/ business objects have to be discreet. Common applications are designed with the user in mind. Many transactions are use to update several records.
All changes have to be stored in the session until the final hit is made to the web-service. This can be perceived as lack of usability.

Process: Workflows have to discreet. Complex workflows can be accomodated but thats not the way clouds are supposed to work. Clouds want each transaction to be discreet. Each transaction moulds the way the cloud grows.

It will take significant effort to migrate any application to a cloud. Most applications will tout cloud compatibility, some tweaks to make the SOA compliant and partially deployed in a cloud. I consider these puffs of smoke.

It will also be essential for clouds to talk to each other. These mash-ups will lead to interdependant using a service from another cloud instead of developing the same.

What would happen to when a servicing cloud shuts down? Even worse would be to the cloud service provider itself shutting down. Business acumen would suggest having a backout plan. Would it be as easy as moving to another cloud service provider? Going by the discomfort to use standards in organizations, I think this is far fetched dream.

Lets see how soon the cloud dissipates.

Please evolve our televisions

The basic television as we know it has remained the same over the last decade. Yes, there have been developments in improving picture quality and sound quality. But as far as functionality goes, the product has remained unchanged.

One simple feature I want all televisions to have is a 'video mute'. As we have a sound mute a video mute will allow sound but the display will be blanked.

You may as me what use is a television without video. I can answer this. Most people have their televisions connected to a DVD/ CD player. Mostly people have stopped having a separate music player. Now if I am playing a CD, I would only like to hear music from the television. I can see the display on my player instead of the television.

It will not only lead to a better usability but it will also reduce electricity consumption.

Flickr-Piknik image editor

I have been using Flickr for the past 3 years and am very happy with their services.Yup, I am still to purchase a pro account as I am not such an avid photographer.

While preparing the header for this blog I chanced to used the photo-editor provide by Flickr. The earlier version was this was a very crude one with minimal features like resizing etc. Now Flickr has tied up with Picnik. This software allows you to edit pictures online.

It starts with a nice progress bar which displays a list of messages like "Planting trees", "sprinkling due" etc. It takes quite some time even on a broadband connection when it loads he first time. Successive loads are fairly quick.

You have access to basic image editing tools available to you. With these you can edit, crop and touch up images. You can zoom in and out using the mouse wheel.

You also have an option to take an image and apply some filters to it. Most filters here can only be available with a pro account. I doubt a pro-Flickr account also qualifies for a pro-Picnik account.

Picnik provides services with other online system also. Its a nice business model for an online product company. Picnik provides its services separately but it has also tied up with other companies to get additional revenue. A tie-up with the likes of Flickr and Facebook is beneficial from a marketing point of view also.

New age business models like the one Picnik is using are worth writing a book upon.

Rickety Wickets

Cricket Wickets
Originally uploaded by schmich

For the past few days I have been investigating Apache Wicket for use in a application we are going to develop.

Apache Wicket is a good framework. Y have to develop all view components in Java, t HTML page is rendered using these components. Developing the HTML pages is very simple. For those who know it, web development will be a breeze.

One thing I did find it lacking is good online documentation. More effort on this front would help getting more developers on this framework.

There are so many frameworks and technologies to choose from. Developers and decision makers tend to make decisions based on good marketing than detailed analysis. Estimates are are based on historical data. They fail to consider time to get accustomed to developing in a new framework/ technology. Once the developer becomes fluent, technology and frameworks change.

Dilbert :"My recommendations are based on an analysis of accountability. As a consultant, I'm not accountable to your stockholders. So I can recommend anything that amuses me."

Technology Industry Evolution

IT industry is know for long unearthly hours and impossible deadlines. Come what may we manage to get projects delivered with satisfactory quality. Due to these reasons this industry is known for good salaries and high returns.

Will US is mulling a new bill for the creation of unions in IT industry. spell disaster to our lifestyles? Here are some thoughts:

Pros-
- Will stop exploitation of employees who are on long running projects with impossible timelines
- Will make it necessary to have great estimation and standardized tools and practices.
Cons-
- Projects will be similar to developing functionality with given tools. Ingenuity will reduce
- IT projects will no longer be pursuits, cut-paste mind-set will be required


The impact on the Indian IT industy remains to be seen. This could a move to promote local hiring as opposed to offshoring. With offshoring does not have to worry about hiring and firing employees. Also it will take a long time for a similar act t be passed in Indian parliament. Till then IT services will continue to flourish.

Lets all wait and watch