Windows Vista!! Its officially out and released to manufacturing. Don’t forget to check out Windows Photo Gallery , its what I have been working on for the last couple of years. There are tons of other new features. My personal favorites, in no particular order, Windows Photo Gallery, Search and Security. 

Windows Vista will be releasing in several editions. Windows Vista Ultimate will be the all encompassing one.  Are you ready for Vista?

Web Browsers have existed almost since the birth of the internet.  From the earliest web browser WorldWideWeb, to text browsers like lynx, to some early crude graphical web browsers to the modern day browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera etc., the browser has indeed come a long way, but a paradigm shift in browsing is due. Layout Engines like Gecko (Mozilla) and Trident (Microsoft) etc. were built in the 90’s for the 90’s while the internet was still a baby. With the internet growing faster than ever before and business moving to the web at a rapid pace, increasing bandwidths and demands for desktop like experiences on the web are majors asks for a Browser overhaul.

Languages like JavaScript (AJAX) are used to provide ‘rich’ apps for today’s browsers. Being an interpreted language with much less functionality and power as opposed to say C++, Lisp etc. makes the ‘rich’ experience very poor indeed. Reasons like these and the demands of the web certainly warrant a walk back to the drawing board for a serious rethink on how the browser should mould itself for the ever changing needs of the internet. Here are some of the things that are fundamental to the next gen browser and some reasons why the today’s browser might soon be a thing of the past.

• Something faster and better than Javascript, perhaps an open standard language designed and built for working especially with Web Controls (Open Standard again) and working with Mutlimedia (Audio, Images, Videos). Yeah, just what the world needs, another language and another standard.
• Better and more UI Controls that would make Web Apps closer to Desktop Apps or maybe even better
• HTML is a thing of the past, enough plumbing has been done on it already (DHTML, AJAX etc..) to try to improve and add to HTML. It’s long due for a change.
• TCP/IP is what the internet is built on today. But things like ECN (Something that I worked on for my Masters Thesis) suggests that TCP/IP and its current feedback mechanisms for handling congestion will soon be outdated with the increased bandwidth speeds and traffic, as we move along. Most applications that depend on networking (like Web Browsers) are often limited by the bounds of TCP/IP.
• The coming few years will see the birth and rise of huge server farms like this one. This will lead to increasing demand of innovation in area of Web Applications. Browsers better be ready for this.
• Paradigm shift to collaborative computing. Blogging, Social Networking, Sharing etc.. are pushing todays browsers to the limit. So much so that, there have been tons of desktop applications written (Windows Live Writer etc..) to just circumvent the shortcomings of the browser

It’s time for a Browser Overhaul

After tons of technology innovations in the memory chip industrty, the MRAM’s are finally here. Rather than relying on electric charges to store memory, this uses magnetic properties like orienatation of magnetic layers in the cells to determince the values of data bits. Unlike flash memory, this has infinite read/write endurance. 

This will give it the capability to store memory even after the device is powered off. Using MRAM in a PC, will give you instant reboot and shutdown capabilites, with the need to probably only recycle time dependant scenarios like network connections etc.

It will be interesting to watch FSL’s stock price over the coming months. 

This was one of the earliest and probably one of the more frustating bugs I worked on. It was my first job and probably around six months into it. printf was still my favorite debugging tool, and was still getting the hang of  debuggers. My task was to improve the performance of Connection pool manager in the JDBC driver I was working on at the time. A section of this code implemented the singleton pattern, and one of the taskitems was to change the regular implementation to the Double Checked Locking Mechanism. I thought this was a pretty clever idea, but it kept breaking and I couldn’t figure out the reason for the longest time. The funny thing was that I couldn’t reproduce this under the debugger and neither were my printf’s (System.Writeline) or colleagues of any help and that made it even more frustating.

I eventually decided not to go ahead with this obviously, but I was glad to know the reason(s) when I finally knew it.

One of the explanations attributed it to a bug in the Java Memory Model (Out of memory writes).

1: public static Singleton getInstance()
2: {
3:   if (instance == null)
4:  {
5:    synchronized(Singleton.class) { 
6:      if (instance == null)         
7:        instance = new Singleton();
8:     }
9:   }
10:   return instance;
11: }

You would expect Line 7 to be atomic, but in fact you can break this up into

7.1 mem = allocateMemory();       //Allocate memory for Singleton object.
7.2 instance = mem;               //Note that instance is now non-null, but has not been initialized.
7.3 ctorSingleton(instance);      //Invoke constructor for Singleton passing instance.

In a multithread environment, you can guess what would happen after one thread loses its time slice after executing Line 7.2

 The other explanation that I heard was that the compiler would get ’smart’ and realize that there was nothing really useful between Lines 3 and 6 and nothing changed the value of the instance variable in between, and so it would ‘optimize’ the code by taking out Line 6 and combining it with Line 3. In Debug mode, it wouldn’t ‘optimize’ this and it worked like a charm.

There have been a ton of discussion around this, a good amount of which is captured here.

Sources for sources: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-dcl.html

How long can a bug go undetected, especially when it’s in a place that is widely used. How about 9 years? This one in the standard binary search in JDK was caused by the infamous overflow error. When the code was originally written, testing something like this was probably infeasible.

That brings up an interesting question, Should you keep testing even after you ship?

This is a good move by the Karnataka government and should help budding entrepreneurs realize their dreams. All the big successful software companies in India have their business models centered around servicing. Yes, it does bring in a lot of revenue, creates jobs, improves the economy, but eventually the fruits are harvested in other places. This needs to change and moves like this will take us one step closer.

There have been programs like this by other state governments, but IMO their objective is to attract more people and help improve the state economy. But something like this, in a place like Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, is certainly a move in the right direction. Although, it is to be seen what kind of benefits will be made available to get more people to adapt this program.

There will be a day when we will have more production units, than servicing centers.

Computers have evolved over the years, from the Antikythera used by the ancient Greeks to study planetary movements, to good old Abacus’, use of punch cards to ENIAC’s, micro computers and main frames to the modern PC that we use today including the various variants like handhelds, laptops, tablets, video game consoles and not to forget the super computers.

It’s been quite a journey, but what will it look like a few thousand or maybe just a hundred years down the lane, long after we are all gone. This is what I envision how my life might look like. There is this device called “brain wave codec”, which I always carry with me. Authentication is through a combination of my DNA (saliva) and a password that I just have to think. I can command the device through thought. The brain waves (electrical signals emitted from the brain) are decoded to analyze my thoughts and convert them into a universal intermediate language which every other device can understand. I wake up in the morning and I need to know what’s happening in the world, maybe catch up with the daily headlines and check out how India did in yesterday’s cricket match, So I just think about it, the codec converts my thoughts and sends the commands out to the web (yeah, its all wireless duh..). The web returns back a bunch of stuff that I am interested in, Its been studying my interests for a while now. The codec then converts it back to something my senses could use, like voice or text or just feed it directly to my brain so I just know what happened. Based on my mood, the kitchen is sent commands to prepare whatever breakfast I want. At work, I will be writing cool user friendly software that shows and analyze users thinking patterns that could be used by businesses to build wonderful applications. During weekends, I would want to go shopping with wife to this new mall, Yeah, I don’t think this will change in a thousand years. So, we sit in our car, the car now already knows about this and it would take us to this new place. We shop around for stuff and pick my things from the shop and just walk out. The checkout system knows who we are and so it just deducts what it needs from my bank balance. We decide to have dinner outside in a Thai restaurant. I think about what the best Thai restaurants are around this new place, I immediately get results from the web and decide to go to one in the list, my car then just drives me there. On the way we pull up the menu and place an order, all through thought. Yeah, even though we can telepathy, we usually just talk. The table and food are ready when we reach there, so we have a good time and leave the place and head back home, a few dollars less.

Google recently struck a deal with Dell to ship new PC’s pre-loaded with Google Desktop and setting Google as the default search engine in IE. Now this is really interesting news.

Didn’t Google recently file an anti-trust suit against Microsoft saying it was using its Desktop monopoly to drive people using IE7 to use its Search Engine.  Now, although this was turned down, what does this tell about Google? I think its beginning to see the threat from Microsoft’s new search technologies. And then the hypocrite deal with Dell.

How valuable is this deal? When Google and MSN (Windows Desktop Search) came out with their desktop search tools, it was meant to improve the search on Windows XP. Search on XP was slow and these tools did add value to the Operating System. However, in Windows Vista, search has improved drastically, (it also happens to be my favorite core feature in Vista.) Why would someone need to install additional software when the inbuilt search in Vista really rocks!!.

This is what I work on. Now that Windows Vista Beta 2 is out, go check out all the cool stuff in it.