Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Privacy

I was reading on TechCrunch (yes, thats one thing I read regularly), and I came across this comment about how being on the Internet implied lack of privacy. I thought it was an interesting thought, and it might actually be true in many cases.

I know a lot of companies out there are working day and night just so that your identity and data is "protected" on the web. Yet, the fact that you open up a browser window and type a url into it, does in some way mean that you might be compromising your data. Your IP is being captured, cookies are being delivered to your machine, and you are being asked to enter data that will continue to sit in some database 10 years from now. What's interesting is that all these things happen so unobstrusively that you hardly think twice about it.

The first few days of Buzz for example, were like that. Everyone wanted to try it out, but no one knew what was actually happening in the background. Google had automatically added certain sources of my information to share with the world, without making it clear to me it would do so.

Gone are the days when privacy meant having your own room.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

ReCaptcha

Did you know that by filling out ReCaptcha captchas, you are actually contributing towards the digitization of books?

ReCaptcha started as a project at Carnegie Mellon that aimed at digitizing books. Captchas were already in implementation by then, and they recognized that a lot of human effort went into solving captchas every day around the world. They figured they could put this human effort to “use”.

ReCaptchas give you two words to solve. One word, they have the answer key to, but the other is an unsolved word from books and such, that they seek interpretation for. People like you and me solve the two words, and the system assumes our answer for the unsolved word is correct. They then present the same unsolved words multiple times to different users, and have a confidence rating in place to verify accuracy.

So, the moral of the story is, if you have a website that you want to protect from spammers and robots, use Captchas. And, if you want to do good while using it, use ReCaptchas!

Reference Source: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

How much social can you handle?

So Google Buzz is here. I am all excited about playing more with it in the next few days. I jump every time I see a new Buzz!

But, on the other hand, I have been thinking, is there too much social going on? I mean, when I have a status update to share, do I put that on Buzz or on Facebook or on Twitter?

Is a centralized solution possible?

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Google Wave

Just watched the preview of Google Wave. Its rightly described as a communication and collaborative tool. The basic idea is you start with a wave and add multiple participants to that wave, in order to share your communication. Pretty much like a bulletin board or forum, except much cooler and smarter.

Things I went “wow” about:

• Open Source: Yes, Wave is going to be open source and it has some amazing embed APIs. Personally, I love the idea of open source, simply because it’s collaborative.

• Real time: My jaws dropped when I watched this. Wave has real time character by character transfer as the conversation happens. Yes, no more of the dreaded “ is typing….” messages to wait on.

• Playback: Really useful feature that does a very simple thing. Plays back all messages in a conversation chronologically.

• Picture sharing: With waves, pictures can be part of your conversation. A simple drag and drop instantly transfers thumbnails to the other participants while the actual images upload.

• Embed into blogs: This one’s exceptionally cool; an incredible new twist to blogging. Drop a blog icon onto your waves, and the conversation is transformed as a blog post on your blog! And yes, as you edit your wave conversations, witness live updates on your blog!

• Collaboratively author documents

Once again, Google Rocks!

Monday, September 21, 2009

MySQL for Database Administrators

I just completed my week long training “MySQL for Database Administrators” at Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara. Now, I am back at work.

It’s almost amazing how much this training can transform you. It’s one thing to build applications using MySQL, but a totally different perspective is required to administer a MySQL database. Yes, your development team is almost going to hate you for this.

Anyway, this course is about how MySQL works, the ultimate truth. And how you can turn that to your advantage. Some very interesting topics covered are NDB Cluster and Blackhole storage engines and database and server optimization. You also get to try out hands-on replication, backup and recovery techniques and such.

For this training, they also offered their new hands-on MySQL DBA 5.1 certification at the end of the course.

Yes, I passed.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Integrity Vs Performance

Its not an easy decision. If you love your data as much, you probably have nightmares all the time about your server crashing. And so, you have daily backups setup, and even binary logging on a separate physical device, may be even clusters, and yet you remain paranoid.

On the other hand, you have your application team constantly complaining about how your databases are sooooo slow. Yes, they don't have any idea how much work it took to organize the data the way it is, choosing the right storage engines, optimizing the tables ever so frequently, and tuning the several hundred server variables just to get to this point.

The fact remains, you can't have a perfect system. You have to compromise, depending on your use case.

It's all about the balance...

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Gmail Outage

So, Gmail is down. Service outage.

Complaints and frustrations are pouring in, even when some have been experiencing the downtime only for a few minutes now. Innumerable tweets about the outage have made Gmail one of the Trending Topics on Twitter. Tech crunch posts a related article about 7 minutes ago, and there are 115 comments already.

I just want to say, Google rocks!

P.S. Yes, they are continually assuring us that they are looking into the problem. They have also put up videos with step by step instructions on how to access you email via IMAP or POP.

Check status at: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en