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Saturday, November 3. 2007

OpenSocial - Google Initiative Posted by Gautam Mani in web at 18:32

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OpenSocial - Google Initiative

Social networking on the web is huge... and then you wonder where does one take it from here. I was always thinking that there should be a way to actually build application that could use (I avoid the word leverage

) the potential of the available network.

Google now takes this a step forward - OpenSocial is a Google initiative for introducing a common platform (think APIs) for building applications on these social networks. The idea is to have a common platform that is supported by all the big players in the business - This allows lots of interesting apps that could be used - it is noteworthy that facebook doesnt picture here

.

Privacy and Security issues will have to be closely watched - but its a good initiative... and they also have sufficient support from the others.

Related Links:
Video on Youtube with reactions from other players
OpenSocial home page

Wednesday, August 15. 2007

Centre to map your phone network Posted by Gautam Mani in security at 22:39

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Centre to map your phone network

Heres an article on "Centre to map your phone network"(located here). Basically a phone network mapping system is being built in India where calling patterns and details are available. It is mentioned that the conversations wont be tapped, but complete information about who calls who is available.

Theres a lot of jargon thrown around here - artificial intelligence, tunneling, encryption, integrity protection, biometric devices (hello?), ... forget it - not worth repeating all of it. What is not highlighted here are the risks that are associated with a system like this - misuse is clearly possible. 15.4 crores is already allocated towards this project - as is labelled as initial cost.

Why does India need a system like this - other than the fact highlighted that "a lot of other countries have systems like these". Another huge point missing here is the policy associated with a system like this.

Some questions I have about this:

What is the kind of success has surveillance systems in other countries had?

What is the total cost like for building a system like this?

What agencies, people have access to information in this system? What kind of authorizations are required?

Why are we talking about the implementation of the system? Have all the sorrounding issues been considered?

And finally... cant all this money be put to better use?

Tuesday, May 24. 2005

Version Control System on Windows Posted by execve in Tech at 23:11

Version Control System on Windows

I was looking for a verison control system to run on Windoze. Requirements were

Free

Open Source

Easily Configurable

Stable and production worthy

Works on windoze without major issues

User-friendly GUI available on windoze

Google pointed me to Version Control Systems Comparison. This page gives a good roundup of quite a few available Version Control Systems (both free and non-free). Thats when I decided on Subversion.

Other than the requirements, the decision was based on the fact that it targets replacing CVS.

A quick look at the documentation indicates that it is quite exhaustive (again very CVSy

); and then installing it takes no time at all. There is also a network model available through an svn (subversion) server called svnserve. So, the steps that I followed were...

Installed subversion - I installed 1.1.4

Setup a repository - similarity with CVS is a big advantage

Setup svnserve - need to change some config files and setup a password file

Download a few GUI clients - RapidSVN and TortoiseSVN

svnserve is setup without too many issues; although I dont like the idea that one has to store passwords for user-authentication in plain text; CVS is better! Maybe there is another option; but I havent been able to locate it as yet.

Next step was using svn through the GUI and checking usability and features. I was not too keen on installing TortoiseSVN as I'm always worried about installing stuff that integrates too tightly with windoze - and does not work like a normal program. So, I installed RapidSVN first.

There is absolutely no documentation on RapidSVN; though setting it up is not all that difficult. You can either add a repository directly or add a working folder to the GUI. It has this explorer kind of interface and you can basically browse and perform operations on files and folders. I found some serious issues with some basic features like diff etc... which are mandatory requirements of a usable GUI. This made me give TortoiseSVN a try.

TortoiseSVN installs like a breeze - but it does ask you to restart. It would help if they could specify what would work after restart (I figured that the Icon Overlay stuff requires a restart). TortoiseSVN integrates with explorer seamlessly, all you need to do is right-click and then left-click

. There dont seem to be any quirks or bugs of any sort till now. It has a diff tool integrated which gives a nice visual diff which most windoze users would be accustomed to. Documentation is present in the form of a windoze help file and it is quite complete. They have this really cool feature called Icon Overlay where your explorer file icons are overlayed to indicate status of the file/folder in the working folder. For example, if a file has been changed, the icon would indicate that there is a change in the file which is different from the repository. Obviously, this is very heavy on the system as TortoiseSVN has to compare files to figure out the status of a file. It also has a recursive status in which case it would recurse right down the directory to find out any files which have changed. This allows one to quickly find out which folders contain files/folders containing changes. I am not sure how this will scale up with the repository size. Another useful feature is that of the repo-browser (Repository browser). This allows one to directly traverse the repository and one can perform operations on the repository itself.

Just shows that one of the most important and problematic areas in OSS is packaging/ease of deployment and documentation. If a user is able to get started quickly, and the tool does the job without any hinderances, rarely would she look at another tool. Probably if RapidSVN had resolved these issues, I would have never looked anywhere else; it probably just needs a little more time to mature.

All in all, looks like its svn and TortoiseSVN for now - until I find a reason not to use them!
Ah - I love the freedom to choose