Author: SK

Saravana “SK” Krishnamurthy is VP of product management at MariaDB. A Silicon Valley citizen for quarter of a century. His passion is to explain complex ideas to "muggles" without horrid and unnecessary details.

Is iPad really "Jesus Tablet"?

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Apple pushed the shipping date of iPad from March 17th to April 2nd. No body knows the reason, it is one more example of Apple’s famous secretive culture. The rumor is that, Apple couldn’t source enough components to manufacture for the anticipated demand. Well, is that really true or are there are bugs that apple is trying to resolve? Even if we take the rumor at the face value, is Apple’s supply chain that weak not to anticipate the demand? There are also rumors that say iPad pre-orders are not as strong as expected. So is it the case of “wait till we reach” the predicted, impressive pre-order rate? A sort of ego issue for Apple to reach certain number of pre-orders before start shipping them?

I‘m not going to buy iPad for three, out of many, reasons:

1. eReader: It is not. In my book, eReader (Amazon Kindle or B&N’s Nook) should have e-ink, paper like, display. iPad has traditional LCD display which doesn’t qualify as eBook reader. Prolonged reading on this device will have same effect as any prolonged reading in laptop will have on your eyes.

2. iPhone OS: Did any one tell Apple that this OS is single threaded? Except iPhone OS all other OSs, (Android, Windows 7 Mobile, WebOS) in the mobile space are multi-threaded. Why do I care? It is annoying enough in iPhone for me to detest the single threaded OS. For example, let us say If I’m playing a game in iPhone and in the middle of the game I want to look at some information in Wikipedia. iPhone OS closes the game and launches the browser. Everytime I switch between these two the application closes the one that I’m using and launches the one I’m switching to. This means, the wikipedia page reloads everytime and the game relaunches every time. Quite annoying, how many OSs in the world are single threaded now?

3. Over priced: The price of decently featured iPad stands at $900. I could buy a nice multi-touch Windows 7 tablet laptop from Dell,HP or even Lenovo for little bit more. In fact, I already own the Dell XT2 Tablet which is a charm and zippy with the new Intel SSD disk.

Father’s day

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Anish has given me a surprise today. He wrote a note in his school that read “Dear Dad, Happy Father’s Day! Thank you for taking care of me. You are the best. I love you!
Love, Anish”

Ha… As a father what else you want than the pure unconditional love your child showers on you.

Father’s Day (6/17/09)

This Blew My Brain Away

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Do you see this lady spinning in anti-clock/clock (right or left) wise?

turninglady

If you see this lady spinning in clock wise, then you are using your right side of the brain. If you notice anti-clock wise spinning you are using your left side of the brain. Most people should be able to switch between right and left brains pretty easily, some times with the help of heavenly C2H5OH . If you cannot, try concentrating on the hip of the lady and you should be able to spin her in other way.

If you always see the lady spinning only in one direction, then you are using only one side of the brain all the time. My suggestion, try a psychologist! or refer to the following chart to figure out your personality.

Presto Linux Reviewed

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Desktop Linux has been around for a while now. Ubuntu was touted as the challenger for windows dominance for a long time. However, Presto might potentially be the David that slays the Goliath (MS-Windows).

Last night I downloaded and installed Presto from Xandros. It is an EeePC or NetBook kind of OS for the systems that already has windows installed. It is meant to be used as an supplement OS on low powered computers and

Requires an existing windows xp installation, not a standalone OS, requires windows already installed in the computer. A simple window shows all the installed applications and a link to appstore that has other applications, commercial and free, that you can install. Installation is snap, without needing to download and running installation. Click on install and Presto downloads it and installs it for you. Uninstallation is as simple as right clicking on the program and select remove.

It addresses the target market very well.
For quick browsing, not so savvy computer users (elderly, kids)
No commmand line interface
Graphics resolutions is very limited
First tries to connect to LAN before trying to connect wireless. Wastes few more seconds to connect to wireless
Window switching is confusing.
Impressively simple user interface for anyone new to computers to use.
No plugins to download in firefox, it comes with flash player so that you can immediatly start using youtube and other video sharing websites. IN summary any website that will work with Firefox will be fine, other websites that require windows may not be accessible.
No minimize button in any windows…

For advanced users…alt-ctl-t will bring up the console.

Is it worth $20? I would think yes, it can make your mom happy and it will make that old laptop in the closet you paid $900 usable again. I was thinking of buying a netbook, spend $300. Instead spend $20 and make that laptop usable again.

Application Store:
For additional applications, we can download from application store. Simple to install and run. Has host of free applications.

Tips 1: Use the “Windows User” directory to store important files.

Sony Vaio : 1min 45 sec

Minimalistic Battery Indicator showed that the battery has 3 min of juice left in it.

Boot into Windows XP
Click on Start->Run
type “msconfig”
this will launch “System Configuration Utility”
Select “BOOT.INI” tab
Select “C:\grldr.mbr=”Xandros Presto”
Notice “Set as Default” button highlighted. Click on it to make the Presto the default boot.
If needed change the “Timeout” from default 30 seconds to 10 seconds. This will speed up the overall booting
Click “OK”.
Restart the system.

Specification for Dell 700m –

Questions:

Does it consume less power than full fledged OS?

Clouds are gathering…Will it rain?

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Though cloud computing has been around in different forms for a long time it became an “in thing” in the technology space recently. Last year, I was introduced to this concept by the excellent book by Nick Carr – The Big Switch. Frankly, I read the book with little interest. The arguments were compelling (ex.equating computing utilities to electric utilities). However, I had my own doubts about the whole notion of utility computing. One of the first problem was the issue of billing. How does the cloud computing providers bill their customers? How well this mechanism will work? The other issue was the huge bandwidth required to make this model work. As the time passed, I noticed the momentum around cloud computing was picking up speed and approaching break neck speeds. It seems now that there is no stopping of this phenomenon. There are big names (Amazon EC2&S3, Google’s AppEngine, Microsoft Azure platform) throwing their weight behind this notion. It appears more real now than a year before.

In addition, every tech company on earth claims to be cloud compatible, be it a company that produces rackable servers, or the Gigabit switching company that garnered high profile Cisco VP as the CEO.

The idea of moving the data center from in-house to out-sourced model creates many confusing terms such as IAAS(Infrastructure As A Service), SAAS(Software As A Service), PAAS (Platform As A Service), Cloud Storage, Cloud/Utility Computing, private cloud, public cloud… the list goes on. ( I will try to instill some sanity to this insanity in subsequent posts).

Is this all hype? Is this another version of ASP model everyone was gungho about during the first internet bubble? With the latest fad, Web 2.0, companies going belly up the stark realities of a bubble is not very comforting for any one watching the tech industry.

However, this time around there are signs that cloud computing is going to stick around and provide real, tangible benefits. I’m especially hopeful of the promised benefits of cloud computing, such as energy savings, rapid ramp up of resources and pay-what-you-use (utility computing) model. On top of this, I am hoping, that the new found love for netbooks is going to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in enterprises.

The biggest challenges for wide adaption of cloud computing will come in the form of network bandwidth availability, data security(in transit and in storage) and management. Nevertheless, as time passes, hopefully, the availability of bandwidth will increase and security concerns will be a thing of the past. With the economy in doldrums and tech industry searching for the next big thing, cloud computing might be one of the saviors which might rescue the tech industry from the slump.

Well… there are signs of rain, will it be enough to reduce the impact of drought?

A handy tip for searching through source code using grep/find.

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Thought this will be useful for navigating source code in any system. (from kernelnewbies.org)

“As you read through the code, you’ll need many times to lookup
the declaration or definition of this or that particular data
structure, macro or function. the most basic way to do so is to use a
combination of the grep (or egrep) and find` commands; 

find . -exec grep --with-filename myfunction '{}' \;

Another way is, 

find . -name '*.[chS]' | xargs egrep -n "myregularexpression";

If you have GNU grep (as virtually all Linux distributions do) then you can take advantage of its “recursive” flag: 

egrep -r --include "*.[chS]" "myregularexpression" .

Add “-w” to avoid catching words in which your search term is a substring.

This
searches the current directory [and all subdirectories] for files
ending with .c, .h or .S, and runs egrep on each of them for the
pattern myregularexpression. Substitute myregularexpression with more
complex regular expressions.”

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