Xobni

You guys know my love for gmail - I just love the cool features it gives me - shortcuts, awesome search features and the like - I love doing things fast and without ever touching the mouse. But I do use Outlook in office, let's say for the lack of a better or maybe more popular e-mail client? I tried some Linux clients for some time but I am so used to Outlook that I will have to wait for Gmail's corporate adoption before I switch.

I agree outlook is an awesome app and very popular at that, but like most Microsoft products, it is intended for the layman, not the developer. Just as Firefox (with it's addons and the hundreds of GreaseMonkey free scripts) compares to IE! You just can't do things fast enough without these things. And Dialog Boxes (with questions like "Do you REALLY want to exit?" I mean, come on!) or views to navigate which you must use the mouse are common.

But to come to the topic of this post, Xobni does not add these things to Outlook (and so these things still remain on my wish-list for Outlook). It does something else - Just check out the awesome demo video the Xobni folks have created.

I bet you'll love it. Yeah it probably does not make Outlook anymore developer friendly (and that probably will never happen anyway) - but it does make it cool! It brings the elements of social networking to Outlook (among other things). And when you get to work/play with fun/cool things you are happier (and so more productive).

The whole point is, it looks like it can make Outlook fun. Oh wait, that's not the whole point, wait, wait, wait!

I usual have good motivating factors for writing blogs, and most of the time they are selfless. You agree? So once in a blue moon I am allowed to do something for myself? Right, read on.

Xobni is in beta right now and is invite-only. You can sign up and you will _eventually_ (you know how eventually usually goes with free, cool and fun?) get it. Or you can advertise it and if enough (that you figure out) people use your advertising to get to Xobni you get it faster.

Yeah that's the whole deal - So go ahead. I have put a Xobni widget right there on the right side of my blog (and that too on top of "About me") . Please click it and add yourself to the beta list. "Show me some love", as they say :-)

The faster you do it, the faster I get to try it - so help me out. And remember if you get onto the Xobni beta list any other way (other than clicking my idget and signing up) I get nada! So please, guys.

And that's the whole point of this blog :-)

And yeah in case you still have not figured it out, Xobni is... you guessed it now, Inbox reversed!

An ultimate Web 2.0 experience

So I had lots of ideas for Friday night - called up lots of people to accompany me into movie, tennis or just-going-somewhere. But no one was free - everyone wanted to do either Saturday and Sunday - which is fine.

So I settled down with a nice movie. And I felt like pizza - last time I had was in New York! Long time...

Checked out Domino's and Pizza Hut (I usually like Pizza Hut better - and that they serve Pepsi helps - my close friends know I'd pick Pepsi over Coke any day - although now I hardly have any of them!). But soon figured out that Pizza Hut cannot deliver at my place - which is odd, considering I am smack in the middle of Seattle downtown! Anyway saw that Domino's did.

And then the cool experience started. Just use their Web order process once - even if you are not a fan of Pizzas!

Ordering was cool! You could edit your pizza in all sorts of cool ways (add this topping only to l/right/all sides, add that too etc.) Nice!

But the best part was after ordering - Just after I confirmed the order a "Tracker" dashboard appeared. And it showed five stages - Order Placed, Prep, Bake, Box and Delivery.

Each stage had a width proportonate to the time it would take (estimated). And as soon as a stage is done it turns Green, the next stage starts blinking and a status message appears at the bottom saying something like "Matthew put your pizza into the oven at 9:03 PM"


Cool ha? Don't believe me - see the attached screen shots - I was so amazed I had to take the screen shots!

Of course there was a glitch with it - after the 4th stage it went back to the 3rd! And I was not so worried about the pizza as I was helping out these guys carry this super idea. So I called them up (and the direct number just flashes on screen - no searching for it) and let them know.

Definitely one of the best web experiences I'hve had in the recent times. Now that I work in a web-based company I've started noticing these things and have become a good netizen!

So this definitely counts among the better Web 2.0 experiences I've had recently. Others include Google Map's public transport times. So you just enter the Source and the Destination (which I have got stored) and click the "take public transport" - voila - it shows you for the current time 3 options for you to take. Like go to this bus stop (walk 2 min) take the bus # 522 at 8:32 PM and get down at this stop (at 8:43 PM), walk home (1 min) and you are done!

And Amazon's "we'll-call-you-back" thing! Everyone whose tried calling customer care anywhere knows how much a pain it is to wait for someone to answer (after all the music or the mech voices _heliping_ you out). So you go to Amazon's customer care page - and they'll say - ok you can call us here at this number (and then identify yourself and give the customer care dude your 12-digit Order #). Or give us a number (or most of the time just select it from a drop down) and we'll call you back! Right now.

And I was amazed - my phone started ringing the moment I clicked "call me" - and since I had used that feature the dude knew who I was and which order I was talking about. Less hassle everyone!

Things like these make me feel good about what I do - it's exciting to be part of the Web 2.0 experience and specially when you are a part of making it!

Which reminds me - voting for the Best 100 Web 2.0 apps is on (alas I did not see Domino's there) - but you can vote for your best apps. It ends March 31st - so go do it now!

An interesting talk I attended today - Consensus in distributed systems

Went to an incredible talk today and was so damn impressed with the presentation and the concepts behind. So wanted to share it with you...

Basically the talk was on Consensus among Distributed Systems. So if you have a Master DB and two Slaves - and if the master dies, how do you choose which Slave to promote, automatically?

Or consider you have some sort of a pool of managers who decide what to do and a bigger pool of workers who do what the managers say. Let's say a manager dies - how do you choose which worker to promote to a manager? Because all of them might be equally eligible to get promoted (we are talking about systems here not humans).

The simple way is - go for the majority. So every worker votes and one of them is elected. But then take in some factors such as message losses, network disturbance and partial network failure - now your vote might not have been so accurate after all ha?

Good Robust systems built to be successful must be fault-tolerant and self-healing. It has to take care of its own - if some process fails, it has to figure out a way to fix it by itself - no human intervention - coz that takes time and money - which is not always easy or affordable. Now if it's just one system you could somehow make it think of these situations. But make a distributed system where each worker has its own mind! The group (distributed system) has to come to _correct_ decision somehow right?

To build such (distributed) systems we need to be able to solve this problem of consensus. A few people have started or already have implemented this (including Google Chubby, Microsoft Autopilot, Amazon S3 etc.)

So this talk was about all this - must say it was done in a very lively manner - with a skit showing the different parts of the system, the network (where volunteers passed messages and took parts of the system - some _crashed_ too ). Was fun!

The idea stems from ancient ages and has been modeled to meet the requirements we have today. It's called Paxos Protocol. Do read up on it - very interesting... You will definitely have nothing but appreciation for the great minds that created the mathematical model in those ancient times and the other great minds who translated it to modern day distributed systems and the other minds who have/are implementing these ideas!

Here are some links:

• The Consensus problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%29
• The algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_algorithm
• Part-Time Parliament by Leslie Lamport: http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (I highly recommend this one - very interesting read - and begins in an interesting manner)
• Leslie Lamport: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

Clipboard diary

Typing something in an e-mail and you need to copy some site's link. What's the big deal? Select, Ctrl+C.
Whoops, just lost the all important 100-line-complicated query that you had made 2 minutes ago? Or maybe something as important that you given to the windows clipboard to keep?

I used to find myself in this situation a lot - then I found ClipBoard Diary! http://softvoile.com/clipdiary

A very convenient and non-intrusive way to remember all the clipboard entries. (Just Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down to see all your clipboard entries). And it remembers the entries even after a reboot (or a crash - we are talking about Windows here remember?) - how? uses a Database.

Enjoy!

Solitude?

Sometimes you feel lonely when you are alone - other times you feel in touch with yourself.

During my growing up days (not that I make any claims that that phase is completely over :-)) I used to spend a lot of times by myself - and I used to feel so good afterwards.

Today I am getting that feeling back again. Have you ever felt this feeling of being alone but not fully too? It's nice I tell you - or maybe it's just me.

So I woke up at 6 AM today (I have almost forgotten that there exists single-digit AMs nowadays - oh wait - there is 2 and 3 AM! Right! But anything after that - naaah!)

And I worked after that - believe me - I worked at 6 AM although there was no real urgency to that effect. But this somehow ruined my day I guess - I went late to work and the whole day just passed like that - meetings and discussions. I did manage to scrape in the bare minimum work anyway...

But the whole day I was feeling like I wanted to spend some time with myself - just doing nothing. Enough of doing something all the time.

So I went for a movie - I wanted to see these 4 or 5 movies since 2 weeks - and I finally made 1 today. Definitely, Maybe. Turned out I liked it a lot - reminds me of my life in some ways - anyway it was a nice movie. Then I started having these solitude/melancholy feelings - yes these words generally are associated with a negative state of mind - but from my personal experience - it's good for you - as long as it's short time. Considering tomorrow morning I have to go play cricket at 8 AM and have lots of other plans for the day there's not much scope of this mood getting extended.

Anyway - right now I am sitting in my balcony - with lights dimmed out - and Nirvana's acoustic tracks playing in the background - looking at the streets 23 floors below me, the mild rain and the people - the lights from all these high-rises around me. Nice... Nirvana just does something to me...

Basically just enjoying the atmosphere - thinking things slowly in a relaxed manner (ok with a beer too - I love European beers by the way) - and that's it.

Quite an abrupt ending - but I never much to say to start with :-)

The eternal wait

Of course you know what I mean right? You have had to wait for something sometime right?

But I feel I am always waiting for something. Always this or that. Kabhi ek mast job, kabhi job satisfaction, kabhi cricket, kabhi koi dost ke liye, kabhi kisi type ka approval ke liye.

But it's always the waiting that gets to me!

:-)

That's it - no elaboration of any of the above... people who know me well enough will know what I mean. Some will know one or two of the "waits", hopefully some will know it all!