Google Search: First real competitor
Google’s dominance over how we search and consume information may be meeting its first real challenge. This article at GigaOM (http://bit.ly/GeZ7C) explains why. And no it’s not Wolfram Alpha or something..
One of the other things that come out of this is; Twitter does not have one coffee shop. It has hundreds and thousands of them, with new ones opening every minute. So how do I know which coffee shop to go? And more importantly, How do I know what conversation is taking place at which coffee shop?
It would be interesting to see, what kind of features Twitter’s rumored search engine comes up with. If this is just a replica of Google Search, in the sense it just shoves keywords into a BigTable data structure, then it would be no use at all. Go to a real coffee shop; not the sluty Cafe Coffee Day ones but a real one like India Coffee House, take a pen and paper and then try to create an index out of all the keywords you overhear or recognize. I bet you will give up. But you can of course gauge trends, and that’s what Twitter Trends is already doing with Twitter.
Hbase-Hadoop VS RDBMS
I am not sure why this has to be a X VS Y, but an interesting presentation nevertheless.
http://docstoc.com/docs/2996433
I believe this choice should be made on the basis of sound Data Modeling rather than anything else. The Relational Model is well know, but very few people know that the Big Table and HBase storage strategy originates from the Entity Value Attribute model.
I find the EAV model ideal for storing all kinds of metadata. Consider metadata for a photograph. While there exists known formats like EXIF and IPTC which embed the metadata inside the file itself, businesses having vast amounts of Digital Assets often add extra metadata, and store it separately. The same thing applies to other domains as well. There could be tons of metadata associated with products like a books, tables, chairs, lamp shades, you name it. Merchants usually markup individual products using keywords, or using some form of key, value pairs.
This metadata could then be indexed or in HBase’s case are sorted and stored near to each other, so that extraction is fast.
Twitter Clients:Adobe Air is Java Swing all over again!
I was looking at a listing of the most popular twitter clients as of April 25.
Here is what is interesting. The second most popular client is TweetDeck, an Adobe Air application, which by the way can run on any OS. Incredibly just behind TweetDeck is Tweetie a native Mac OSX client, that too with about 10% market share. The thing is Tweetie didn’t even exist 7 days ago. It was launched few days ago, got some momentum from a Techcrunch coverage, and here we are 7 days later; it is among the top of the leader board. WOW!
This also confirms one of my theories. People hate Abode Air apps. First there is the obvious reason. AIR apps take bucket loads of RAM, and are comparatively slow to respond to user actions. The second issue is a subtle one. An AIR app does not look like a native application, mainly because it uses a different font rendering mechanism. The GUI therefore looks alien and non native-sh.
So why is TweetDeck at number two? Simple, there are no native Windows clients worth using. Blu and Digsby could be game changers, but they still need some refinement. There are no twitter clients for Windows, which you can compare to native Mac OSX clients like Tweetie or Nambu. The user experience is just awsome. The day Digsby or any other native windows client can offer the same functionlity as TweetDeck, users will flee these Adobe Air applications like plauge.
The other interesting thing about the list, is the number of iPhone apps that people are using to connect to twitter. TwitterBerry a blackberry app is popular too. At this rate Apple and RIM should rename their phones to Twitter Phone 1 and Twitter Phone 2 respectively!
But back to the main issue. Why is Adobe making the same mistake that Sun made with Java Swing? I think they even hired Dr Hans Muller, who used to head the Swing Team at Sun. No disrespect to him though. Genuinely nice person and a visionary in his own right.
A bit of background. I have written applications like Graph Editors, Data Entry Forms and Visualization Tools usign Java Swing for about 6 years while I was at Connectiva Systems, so I know S-W-I-N-G.
When I look at Adobe Air, it reminds me of the same problems that plauged Swing circa 2004. No native font rendering, bad start up times, inaccurate simulation of native widgets, slow paint and redraw times….
Swing back then, was just not good enough. It took Chet Haase at Sun (who too is now at Adobe) years and years of hardwork to do native font rendering, graphics accleration and better integration with native themes, so as to make Swing Applications look, feel and perform like native apps. Today’s Netbeans and Intellij which are built on Java Swing, are a lot more usable than say in 2004.
Of course, Adobe Air has it’s strenghts. The same strenghts that Swing had. Visualization Tools, Graph Editors, Dashboards and Scorecards, just rock on Air, as they did with Java Swing; but not Twitter Clients, Text Editors or Data Entry Tools. They are much better done in native code. The success of Tweetie confirms this.
So, now that the whole Swing team is at Adobe; How long will it take for them to fix AIR?
Well I don’t know about you, but I am running out of air.
Netbeans 6.7 Looking Great on Mac
I was pleasantly surprised as how good the new build of Netbeans looks on the Macintosh.
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- Netbeans Code Editor Mac
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- Netbeans Project View
Compared to Netbeans, Eclipse looks downright ugly now.
IntelliJ to Netbeans:Flipping the switch, Tip 1
Have been using IntelliJ for about 5 years now. It is still the Roll Royce of all IDEs, and of that there is no doubt.
But having said that, you should once in a while jump the ship, and try out something different and it is with this intention that I am currently trying out Netbeans 6.1.
I was a Netbeans user starting from its “Forte for Java” days to about 2003, and did also develop some plugins on it.
So it feels great to be back home.
Well not quite. Though Netbeans has now added almost every trick in the bag, it is still challenging even for a veteran, to pick up from where they left off.
To ease this pain of transition, here is the link to an IntelliJ Key Map, which when applied to Netbeans, will make Netbeans feel more like IntelliJ to you. If you find yourself pressing CTRL+ALT+L, CTRL+ALT+O and CTRL+F12, this keymap will be a real time saver.
More to come in this series. Stay tuned.
Thinkpad Scrolling fixed for Safari and IntelliJ.
Got a brand new Thinkpad T61 today from my company. It is a bit under powered with only 1 GB of RAM, but the great keybooard more than makes up for it.
However there is one peculiar problem with it’s touchpad software (called ultranav, somewhat ironically). For certain apps Virtual Scrolling, or Touch Pad edge scrolling, similar to middle button mouse scrolling as in a 3 button mouse, does not work.
Safari on Windows and IntelliJ IDE suffers due to this problem.
Well there is a fix after all. Just add the following lines to your
C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\TP4table.dat file
; IDEA support
*,*,idea.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9
; Safari support
*,*,safari.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9
You get the idea don’t you? Now if Netbeans or Eclipse does not get ultranav scrolling support, you know what to do isn’t it?
Writely or Wrongly,Google Docs screwed up.
I was an early user of Writely the document editor startup which Google bought a few years ago.
One of the features they had, is that you could publish a writely document directly to your XML RPC enabled blogging platform. I was a jroller user then, but have subsequently moved to wordpress. I published my documents first to jroller and then copied it over to wordpress later.
Now to the problem. On 1st January 2006, I had written a document in my writely account named “ Why you should right align form labels?” I had used Writely’s insert image feature to first upload and then insert about 10 images as illustrations for that article. Those illustrations were quite complicated to draw, and I had to use my friend’s copy of Adobe Illustrator for the purpose.
Those images have now simply vanished.
ISRO taking on Google Earth?
The Indian Space Research Organization will launch their own Satellite Imaging website later this year.
ISRO says that images from it’s own array of Remote Sensing satellites will power this website.
With regards to the quality and resolution of the images, well read this.
“We are going to launch our own satellite images on the web within six months from now. Our images are quite good and even better than Google,” ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair
Tall claims? May be not, because ISRO already sells high res satellite imagery to about 20 countries around the globe including to some in Europe, and also in the US through it commercial arm ANTRIX.
Run Webkit nightly builds on Windows.
I was really impressed after reading this blog entry from computer world.The author claims that the current Webkit engine is the fastest around and is even faster than Opera. However, his tests were performed on Mac, so I wanted to see if the same tests could be performed on Windows.It turns out that running the latest nightly build of Webkit on Windows, is not difficult at all.You just need to have
- The latest version of Safari for PC.
- Download the latest build of Webkit.
Launch a process from Java and wait for it to complete.
I have seen dozens of examples of launching a Program from Java, but none of these address the following
- Launch a process.
- Wait for it to complete.
- Get the standard output.
- Get the standard error.
Most examples just show you how to call process.exec() and that’s it.So this code attempts to achieve all of the above. Read the rest of this entry »
