Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Keeping your sanity while saving the Green

I've been in a dilemma for a while. Motivated primarily by the barrage of (government sponsored) advertisements about conserving energy that erupted in American TV recently, I've been wondering whether our mere existence is a threat to the world.

Here is my reasoning. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is check email (Yes - it sounds geeky but I really spend at least 15 minutes skimming through my mail right after I wake up). Starting from that every action I do comprises of a threat to the environment.

1. The computers are made of plastic / silicon / ceramics and other heavy metals. They won't run forever and one day they'll have to go. Due to their design its extremely difficult (if not impossible) to recycle them and the most probable place they'll end up is the landfill. The effect is doubled since I usually have two computers running.

2. They consume electricity. My power company (DP&L) primarily uses coal and I contribute green house gases (despite the best efforts to reduce emissions by DP&L) per every clock tick.

done with email! I walk over to the washing basin and open the tap for hot water. The moment I do so warm water starts flowing, kept hot by an electric heater, which contributed much more green house gases than my beloved computers.

Then I walk over to the kitchen, fill a bowl with my favorite cereal (Honey bunches of Oats), pour some milk into it and put it in the microwave to heat for 1 minute.

3. The cereal is made of primarily corn and wheat (and also oats as its name suggests) which has been grown in large farms, farms which were built on natural pastures and add a startling amount of pesticides and artificial fertilizers to keep growth to a maximum.

4. Same goes to the milk - which did not come from a 'friendly neighborhood farm' but the nearest supermarket.

5. The microwave, fridge that kept the milk, they all consumed a hefty amount of kilowatts pushing out more greenhouse gases.

I didn't even walk out of the kitchen yet but I've contributed lot to emitting a bunch of greenhouse gases.

The point of this somewhat funny (nevertheless true) account of my daily routine is to show that the sane way of life is not possible without effecting the environment. Unlike some extremist environment groups who think that progress should have zero effects on the environment, our mere existence effects the environment significantly.

So what ? Is there anything we can do about it ? Obviously we cannot make it zero and some of the counter measures we plan to put in place don't change things a lot. [ This reminds me of something I noted in a public rest room in Berkley CA (yeah - odd place to find interesting slogans ;)). The usual paper towels has been replaced with a electric hot air blow dryer with a boiler plate saying 'save the environment, use less paper'. Next to the boiler plate written in a marker pen 'yeah, and burn a lot of coal to generate electricity']. It is amply clear that we cannot go back to the untouched state of the earth and we should accept the fact that we cannot exist without being a significant effect on the environment. But at the same time we as humans should not act as we don't understand the importance of the earths balance. For the most part of it, majority of us (including me I should confess) did not take this seriously. Yes, I switch off the extra lights and use CFLs everywhere in our house but I did that in thoughts of less electricity cost than less impact to the environment.

However things are taking a slow change (primarily due to the rise of oil prices). Here in US, there is a lot of interest in using power saving appliances. There are plans to do more power generation with environmentally friendly technologies such as geo-thermal or wind power. Wind farms are coming up everywhere (interestingly the state of Texas being one of the leaders)and there is major initiative going on to reduce dependency on oil. Oil companies are now known as energy providers and market themselves as environmentally responsible enterprises [Though I have suspicions about how responsible they are]. All in all we are seeing good changes in the way things are being done. It does not mean by any way that you should jump into everything that has the green label. (Electric blow dryer being a naive example)

If you've cared to read until now and not tired of my rambling, here is the message to take home. 'Save the green but don't go to extremes'!

Monday, August 11, 2008

Gmail down ?

Being a gmail user since 2003, this is the first time I've experienced a server error ! Don't believe me ? See the image

Friday, July 25, 2008

Microsoft and opensource

After reading the recent post from Sanjiva I was tempted to write this bit down. I've been debating similar points with my friends, specially Karthik who has become an avid Mac/OS-X fan over the last year or so. For the record I'm primarily a Linux user (in fact I'm using one of my Ubuntu boxes right now) but I do use windows (XP though) to run my iTunes and an occasional office product. So here are some of my observations.

1. Microsoft is a good technology company. If you look at the world with the researcher hat on, the best place to work right now is Microsoft research (MSR). They do really good research and come up with great technologies (not to mention the good pay :) In fact my personal experience in M$ during the interop in 2005 is a very positive one regarding the technology they have. Its not really a surprise since they have the best brains working for them). If you look at technologies like .Net and Silverlight, there are many merits over the other prevailing technologies. However M$ has a bad track record and known for their extreme focus only on their (winxx/MSSQL etc) platform and the public looks with skepticism when it comes to using their technologies. I've met Mac/Linux geeks that are interested in M$ technologies but are not getting into them simply because its from M$. However it is not a reason to discredit M$ of their technological perspective.

2. There are tendencies towards moving towards a more open environment. Port25 is a very good starting point. Open specification promise is a good gurantee. I see these as signs of blending in with the opensource culture that is blossoming. In fact one of the recent moves to offer facilities for certain opensource foundations to test their software on Winxx platforms (sadly of which I am not at liberty to discuss the details) is an indication of their realization of the strength of Opensource. However just as Sanjiva and others mentioned we are not gonna see an open windows or community MSSQL soon (or may be never!). Purely in my POV its unrealistic to assume so. Do we see any other big company (IBM/Oracle/Apple/Google) opensourcing their core products ? No, not even true for a company like Google whose motto is 'Don't be evil'!

3. Microsoft will always be a strong presence in almost all technological fronts. Contrary to the popular geek beliefs, I don't assume M$ to go bankrupt soon. Yeah, Apple is doing well but if you consider global sales, Apple is still miles behind. XBox is doing well (despite Wii beating it to the first place recently). Their enterprise / back office products are doing fairly ok. They have a ton of money in the bank and most of the best brains still work for them. These guys are not gonna be wiped out from existence just like that.

4. Their size makes them a prime target. I think of this as the case of the bright, big, nerdy kid in school. They constantly get teased just because they are noticeable. There are many cases where M$ has become the victim of attacks just because they are the most visible player (Note that they are no saints. There are cases where M$ pushed their own agenda. But at the end of the day it comes down to business and any other software company in the same place would have not gone a different way). For example in the Operating System space Apple gets a lot of attention and a lot of people would pick M$ as the bad guy if you put Apple and M$ side by side. Think about it. OS-X is as proprietary as Windows, only runs on Apple hardware (which you pay a fortune to get) and go to extremes when it comes to protecting their assets. Why are they not perceived as evil then ?

I am not white washing M$. But I believe they wouldn't just go away and a (apparently) healthy relationship is coming up with the Opensource world. They are already supporting Opensource software vendors, build on top of open protocols and start taking small steps towards living in harmony with the others. We should not jump into conclusions :)

Saturday, July 19, 2008

My first car in US !

After about 2 years living in US I got my first car here (I've had cars before but this is my first in US). Its a Honda Accord and the pictures will tell the story :) Bunch of thanks goes to Meena and Karthik for helping me out in my car hunt.





Friday, July 11, 2008

Cool gmail feature

being an avid fan of gmail and its browser interface I'm ashamed to say that I missed this feature. In fact I've no idea when it was added. it simply tell you how many gmail windows are open at the moment and from what IP.



Sunday, June 29, 2008

Sri Lankan Conflict makes into American TV Drama!

I'm a fan of crime drama and a show I regularly watch (many thanks to the DVR:)) is Law and Order : Criminal Intent. The episode aired in USA network at 9.00pm today (06/29/2008), named Assassin is centered on an American educated female leader figure who undergoes house arrest in Sri Lanka and then becomes target of an assasin who is after her life! [spoiler warning - the story ends with a twist and the victim becomes the suspect] Here are some of the places where Sri Lanka is mentioned.

1. Det.Logan mentions that 'She's being in house arrest in Sri Lanka ... ' at the crime scene.
2. The captain says 'Sri Lankan hard liners, Tamil tiger terrorists, in short there's a lot of people after her life'
3. The Hudson University president says in his introduction 'A young student from Sri Lanka'

I understand its fiction and all made up. But my concern is that you guys could've done a better job in getting the facts straight. Looks to me this character was made up by mixing features from other female political figures in the Asian region such as Benazir Bhutto who studied in US and wears a dress with a scarf and Aung San Suu Kyi whose being under house arrest for a while and also won the Nobel peace prize. See my reasoning below.

I. The name of the center character is 'Bella Kahn'. That's probably a very alien name for a Sri Lankan.
II. She is educated in US. There are many foreign educated political figures but very few are American educated.
III. There is no record of a female leader figure being on house arrest during the recent past in Sri Lanka AFAIK (Apart from Sirimavo being kept under house arrest in the early 80's). Non of such people were named for the Nobel peace prize (except for Dr.Mohan Munasinghe who is part of IPCC and shared the peace praze with Al Gore.)
IV. The lady wears something that looks like a north Indian/Pakistani dress with a scarf!
V. Her family has a trust fund of millions of dollars which is not normal for even the wealthiest of Sri Lankans.


Saturday, June 28, 2008

Mootools is cool and I'm moving to scribfire

After some time I've decided to move to scribefire (an awesome little plugin for firefox) so that I can manage my blogger account and my own websites blog as well. Scribefire integration is amazingly smooth, works super well with both blogger and Drupal.

So here is the note of the day :) mootools, an amzingly well written javascript framework. I've been doing some serious javascript stuff (and I do admit that GWT rocks and YUI! is a cool set of widgets. I've worked with both drilling down to a considerable level. And sorry the stuff I'm working on is a kind of 'hush hush' at the moment ;)) and I'm amazed to see how well structured mootools is. Its definitely something that a serious javascript developer should check out.

This also brings us to the interesting case of framework lock-in. It's not a vendor anymore (since stuff like GWT/YUI/mootools are completely free and comes with no strings attached) but the framework. We've seen this happen with the Java Web application space where frameworks like Struts and JSF(MyFaces) were initially well received but later the interest died down. Why ? Yes struts makes the initial development easy and lets you keep things neatly seperated but you are bound to struts for eternity ! If there is anything that struts cannot do - well , either you can't do it in your webapp or you'll have to find a really ugly hack to work around it, possibly violating most of the best practices established for struts. This becomes a serious issue when your app grows beyond the capabilities of the framework. You've come too long (so that rewriting is not an option) but you cannot go beyond the framework.[Subsitute struts with any other framework of your choice and the story will be the same].

The javascript space is becoming the next framework playground and things are getting muddy already.From the top of my head I can name at least half a dozen (dojo,YUI!,mootools, GWT, script.aculo.us,openrico, sproutcore etc. In fact I see that I did name more than six. I did write them in one go - honest :)). I'm not sure whether we'll come to the same conclusion as the Java Webapp space because Javascript is primarily client side and the limitations imposed by the framework are primarily on the devlopment resources and have small or no consequences with the performance or scalability of a Webapp.

Let us wait and see :)