from-lamports-bakery dept.

Leslie Lamport is due to speak at Hopkins in the weekly seminar series. Needless to say, I'm excited and looking forward to hearing one of the great sages of Computer Science speak.

Here is a Bio that was circulated by the CS Department, probably self-authored :-)

Dr. Lamport is best known as the author of LaTeX, a document
formatting system for people who write formulas instead of drawing
pictures. This naturally led him to join Microsoft, a company with
little interest in such people. He is also known for writing

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a
computer you didn't even know existed can render your
own computer unusable."

which established him as an expert on distributed systems. Among his
other contributions is the TLA+ specification language--a Quixotic
attempt to overcome engineers' fear of and computer scientists'
antipathy towards mathematics.

The fact that I am currently taking a Distributed Systems course right now, can only be decribed as poetic.

you've-got-mail dept.

What a lame title, but anyway, here goes...

Email clients are hitting their limits of scalability.

Now, I get almost a couple hundred small emails everyday, and keeping track of them is a nightmare.

Email traffic characteristics have fundamentally changed since I started working. Now they are almost instant messages, in form, mode of address, size and content. Most people seem to treat them as instant messages with more metadata tags and end-to-end archival built into the fabric.

I recently listened to the CEO of the company I work for mentioning that e-mail is a store and forward protocol, like physical mail, and that is the way he handles his email : read it once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the evening, and don't look at it in between.

However, with disk, memory, processor and network bandwidth being what they are today, email is more like an instantaneous delivery system. And senders invariably expect recipients to respond instantaneously with at least an acknowledgement.

All of which basically makes my poor email client unable to cope. Now I have MacOS Tiger, so with Spotlight, my life is that much easier, but it only highlights how critical Desktop Search will be as an application in the next few years.

The trouble with mail clients is that they are still stuck in the 2-d, tabular, database world, when they really need to be data mining applications. Filters and Saved Searches are just stored procedures, in the end, and a highly watered down from at that. What I really need is a multi-dimensional, heuristic tool for analysing my mail, and presenting it to me so that I don't miss anything critical.

I don't actually mind seeing a bit of spam here and there, as long as I don't drop critical emails.

I think it would be a great idea to build a next generation communication tool that does this, combining e-mail, instant messaging and voice. Gmail is ofcourse, the best bet, and Google is surely on the right track by integrating Gtalk with it, but I have privacy concerns with Gmail.

Actually, frankly, Google is beginning to scare me. It is beginning to resemble too closely, the funny little guy you introduce to your friends, who quickly usurps centrestage, and makes your world suddenly unpredictable, and somewhat dependent on his whim. You wonder, "Have I created a saint or a sociopath?".

Hmmm...

konquer-your-desktop dept.

KDE 3.5 is finally out. I've been using Beta 2 for some time now, and I can heartily recommend it. In addition to being serious eye-candy, this is probably the first significantly usable, yet powerful windowing system for Linux.

KDE has always been extremely configurable, and this version does not disappoint. Significant chznges include applets that you can drop onto the taskbar, transparency support that would really rock if X would let it, the Kopete IM client that finallly manages to kick the aweful GAIM in the arse, and a bunch of cool navigation tools in Konqueror, which i prefer over firefox.

I really hope more people use KDE, and bury that text-console simulator for VGA, more popularly known as GNOME.

a-real-book-review dept.

I am currently reading the book The Best Software Writing I (ed. Joel Spolsky). The editor is of course, a high profile blogger and code-philosopher. The book is organized around the same topics that the editor deals with in his blogs i.e. software processes, defining product quality, some hiring heuristics, lifestyle issues for coders and a bit of business sense thrown in for good measure. And of course the outsourcees. Grrrr...The outsourcees...Those evil-smelling, foul-talking, gibberish-spelling spineless serfs from the nameless land. I was thinking of Chaplin's "Der Juden" rant as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator. If you haven't seen it, its the greatest impression ever. Actually, those are the kind of subjective statements you are likely to find in this book.

But its eminently readable, and some of it even makes sense.

However be warned: it is written from the coders' perspective. Which means that the world-view this book reflects belongs to people who spend 90% of their working time (which may be 90% of their actual waking time :-)) hunched over their monitors furiously assaulting their keyboards - and the remaining 10% being assaulted by the QA and marketing teams in meetings about bug fixes and product specifications. So expect a whiny-ass tone and lines like "A good manager should...blah, blah, blah...".

There are no conclusive answers to some of the social questions raised, only vague solutions like "hire developers, not programmers". Hmmm...and why and how do people make the transition between these two extremes? There are vague indicators, but again, most of the solutions proffered by the book take the form: "you either do or you don't". Not a very scientific approach, if you ask me.

retro dept.

RSS seems to be the new hot thing -- the shopping cart of the 2000s. Strange that multi-dimensional information structures like the web should be built, only to be abstracted out into single-dimensional linear feeds like RSS.

disks-get-harder dept.

I don't know jack about disks.

I had no clue that the average hard-disk on the desktop had only one platter. Neither did I know that the CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) model of a disk I learnt in school (and from a lot of geek magazines) is slowly going out of existence. Seems to me that drive mechanics has finally evolved to a point where disks are essentially, gradually starting to behave like large tape spools with a big on-board read/write cache :)...Tape Spools yes, albeit with much better random seek performance.