HTML 5, Google I/O and Evolution of Applications.

Earlier this week, I had occasion to attend the Google I/O conference. This blog post is more reflective than a factual report on the event. (For factual reports, e.g., see Google: The browser is the computer, Google Wave: A new kind of mega-application).

In the beginning, e.g., with the ENIAC, people programmed in 1s and 0s. The initial tedium was avoided by the invention of assembly language programming. The primitives that the programmers dealt with included registers, memory and i/o in the form of tapes and disks.

Subsequently, there were several high level programming languages invented, stack machines supported block structured languages. For a very long time, the stack machine seemed sufficient, and even the concept of classes were implemented on top of the stack machines. The primary commercial successes in this arena are C/C++ and Java and their variants.

In this conference, the primary message appears to be that the communication content, in Google Wave, is modeled as hosted XML documents, and the primitives that a programmer uses within a browser are the ones that manipulate the document object model (DOM); and, there are several new primitives, i.e., tags like canvas, video, audio, etc., built natively into HTML 5. (A good introduction to the model methods is available at HTML DOM Primitives and XML DOM Primitives). Thus, while the stack machine continues its reign, additional functionality is being expected of the platform in terms of the DOMs.

To promote concurrency in applications, the concept of Web Workers is available in HTML 5.

What happened in the last 50 or so years? Now, the basic computational platform (within a browser) is one that supports very granular manipulation of pieces of communication that is relevant among human beings (and computers), rather than registers, stack, etc. This is good; it is easy to see progress.

Now, in the future, why would anyone want to build non-browser applications? Particularly since JavaScript engines seem to be gathering better performance all the time? Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine is available as open source. (There is a separate web page (v4) to assess V8's performance of a browser on your computer).

The state of globally accessible health information on the Internet.

The Google blog post titled Listening to Google Health users is illustrative of the work in front of us before we can claim universal accessibility of health information over the net. The ICD codes have been in use for quite some time now, since 1893 in some form or the other, but the Google Health episode brings forth the need for greater accuracy in defining these codes and their descriptions.

The point to be noted is that computerization greatly helps, and sometimes accelerates, correct classifications.

Use of arbitrary HTML in Gmail signature block.

If you have been wondering about when Google will get around to accepting arbitrary HTML in Gmail signature blocks, look no more! There is a published solution, on the web, but with one constraint: 

You have to use Firefox as your browser. A web developer named Chris Pollock has made that publicly available as a Firefox add-on.

 
I have started using it, and love it. Don't you relish the ubiquity, and hence the shareable characteristic, of the Internet?

Typing in Indian Languages in Gmail, Blogger, etc.

A large percentage of the Indian population can now start communicating in their local languages through computer, thanks to the recently announced availability of Indic language typing from within the Gmail compose screen.

Nearly 1 billion of the world's population has a new, easier, way of making use of computers and the Internet.

And, for the 35 million or so Kannada-speaking population: ಸಿರಿಗನ್ನಡಂಗೆಲ್ಗೆ.

The Cost of Improving Secondary School Education in America.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, we now know that we can expect a deficit of $1.7 trillion for the fiscal year 2010 of the United States.

We also know, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that there were about 1,133,000 secondary school teachers in America in 2006.

And, as of December 2008, the US Government has already committed to financial bailouts worth $8.5 trillion.

With the foregoing as background, let us review what it would mean to increase the salaries of secondary school teachers. (We all know that merely increasing the salary is not adequate).

Let us assume that the average yearly salary of secondary school teachers in America is $50,000. Let us further assume that, in order to attract and keep the right secondary school teaching talent, we will need to pay the teachers a salary of $100,000/year.

Thus, the additional yearly cost of paying the teachers a better salary is of the order of $50,000*1,000,000, or $50B/year.

Is $50B/year a high cost for educating America's children? In the light of dollar deficits in excess of $1 trillion/year? Or, even when we have surplus budgets, in a $15 trillion/year economy?

Happy New Year, 2009.

For quite some time now, I have become very conscious of [even unwittingly] spamming others. Thus, I want to try a different method, other than sending out long mass e-mail messages to my contacts, of wishing a happy new year.

Let us review the magnitude of the resource usage on this wishing well for the new year. From the web site titled World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats, we see that there were about 1.4B Internet users in a total population of about 6.6B, a 21.9% Internet usage penetration. Now, even if each of these 1.4B Internet users send out 10 "Happy New Year" e-mail messages at about 100 bytes each, we would have a bandwidth usage of 1.4T bytes. In addition to the bandwidth usage, there is also the disk space used up somewhere to store these 1.4T bytes, prior to their deletion. And, there is the potential annoyance factor: When someone gets 100 "Happy New Year" messages, it is unclear how each of these messages would provide the personal viewpoint that the sender would want to convey to each recipient, other than the fact that the particular e-mail message came from a particular individual. Thus, if a personalized message to each recipient is neither necessary nor desirable, a better mechanism to use is web-based communication.

If, instead, people send out merely the phrase "Happy New Year, 2009" in their new year e-mail messages, with a hyperlink to the web-based message, the following will result:

1. Greater bandwidth usage will be limited to those who click on the hyperlink.
2. Disk space used is probably reduced by an order of magnitude: There is only one copy, on the Internet, of the long e-mail message that corresponds a post like this.
3. Annoyance factor is almost completely removed: HTML rendering at the recipient will only present the 20 characters in the phrase "Happy New Year, 2009".

The RSS feed mechanism takes this communication one step further: You will only get an e-mail message if you have a subscription to the communication from the sender.

[Aside. Granted these terabytes are but a drop in the bucket in the approaching zettabyte era, but there is always a question of why a resource must be used when it is not so unavoidably required. (1.4T/1Z ≅ 1000 exp -3, or 10 exp -9). End of Aside].

Whatever the justification, this is a new experiment I want to make in this Web 2.0 world, at least for this year. So, if you happen to read this blog post, my message to you is, very simply: Happy New Year, 2009.

The US Financial Meltdown.

In his op-ed column titled All Fall Down, Thomas Friedman provides a rather succinct account of the chain of financial missteps that the US financial environment was able to permit in recent years. This is a good reminder, and an analysis, that some form of regulatory oversight is required to prevent such meltdowns from occurring. Thus, the ideological "hands-off" approach of some politicians regarding the economy is very flawed. 

What is always required is some sort of oversight to ensure that the resources in a system are deployed properly. Why else do we have operating systems overseeing resources in a computer system?

College Education in a Barack Obama Administration

In an increasingly competitive global and knowledge-intensive world, it is extremely important for a government to provide mechanisms to ease the burden of college education among today's college-bound students. While Barack Obama's proposed campaign promise is 100 hours of community service in exchange for a $4,000 tuition credit, it is the approach that is to be commended. 

100 hours translates to about 12 days (of 8 hours each), or about 3 months of elapsed time if a student uses only weekends to perform the community service.

Let us hope some effective educational program on these lines will indeed be implemented by the Barack Obama administration.

Is your civic responsibility done?

Dear Fellow Americans:

Have you voted yet? It is important you do because America is at a significant point in its history. Credit-based excesses at every level have brought the country to a strange condition, not fit for a nation that, until very recently, was the very epitomy of strength in the world. (If you understand Kannada, you can read my blog post in Kannada on America's credit excesses; as I wrote that post, I also added the America's national debt counter on this blog's sidebar). As a matter of fact, a large part of the immigration into this country in the past several decades is attributable to such strength.

Recent events have brought out all kinds of sentiments, including some humorous ones such as this one titled Britain is repossessing the U.S.A. And, on a more serious note, an article by Fareed Zakaria makes The Case for Barack Obama. I also found a book that compares the voting records of Obama and McCain, shown at left. I suspect it is interesting, but I have not read it.

Anyhow, I have already decided on how I would vote. Have you?

-

R.

TiEcon 2008, Day 2, Saturday, May 17, 2008

This blog post is about some of my thoughts on the 2nd day of TiEcon 2008. This is not intended to be complete by any means: there are other blog sites that may provide a complete version.
Mike Malone, who handled a fire side chat with Elon Musk today, characterized him as really Entrepreneur Extraordinaire. The discussion on Wikipedia itself is an ample illustration of that. Elon's versatility is quite self-evident. An individual who built several successful information technology companies has now gone on to build several more in other fields: SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity.

The presentation by Chamath of Facebook was another excellent one. The slides were not at all busy, but still made the points very eloquently. For networking professionals focused on actual plumbing, it is very thought-provoking because he introduced a "social stack", after discussing the OSI stack and the LAMP stack. It looks like Facebook is really a good platform for consumer-oriented social networking applications. Its applicability in the business world, however, is not all that obvious [to me].

Probably the most moving of all presentations was one by John Wood. After leaving Microsoft, he founded Room to Read, a non-profit organization focused on promoting education of under-privileged children in the world. To date, it has produced awesome quantitative results. With a few more John Woods, the world will be a much better place to live. The presentation brought tears to my eyes.

ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಬ್ಲಾಗು (blog).

Folks not familiar with Kannada will wonder what this blog post is about. This is about an excellent new feature in Google's Blogger: the recent addition of support for Indic languages. The man-machine interface is so good that you can create real Kannada characters just through a browser, as you can see below. However, the software is still evolving and not all input avenues produce the same result always. (This is very reminiscent of lack of object-oriented behavior that early Microsoft products used to have).

[Warning: Kannada characters show properly only in Internet Explorer and Safari; I don't quite know what is not right with the Mozilla Firefox].

You can use any natural phonetic transliteration that you can think of, and you are prompted for possibilities. In other words, all the procedures you had to go through using Baraha seems unnecessary. If you didn't get it right, no sweat. You will get a popup Kannada keyboard mini-window from which to select the right Kannada representations. (In Internet Explorer 7.0, the popup mini-window sometimes shows up almost outside of your view area).

ಈ ಪುಟದಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಕೆಲವು ವಾಕ್ಯಗಳನ್ನು, ಮತ್ತು ವಾಕ್ಯಾಂಗ ಭಾಗಗಳನ್ನು, ನೀವು ನೋಡಬಹುದು.

1. ೧. ಸಿರಿಗನ್ನಡಂಗೆಲ್ಗೆ.


2. ೨. ಅ ಆ ಇ ಈ ಉ ಊ ಋ ೠ ಎ ಏ ಐ ಒ ಓ ಔ ಅಂ ಅಃ


3. ೩. ಇಳಿದು ಬಾ ತಾಯಿ ಇಳಿದು ಬಾ.


4. ೪. ಸರ್ ಮೋಕ್ಷಗುಂಡಂ ವಿಶ್ವೇಶ್ವರಯ್ಯ.


5. ೫. ಮೈಸೂರು ವಾಸುದೇವಾಚಾರ್ಯರ ಯಾವ ಕೃತಿ ನಿಮಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತು?


6. ೬. ಶ್ರೀಮತಿ ಗಾಯತ್ರಿ ಅವರೇ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಈವತ್ತು ಏನು ಅಡಿಗೆ?


7. ೭. ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕ ಮಾಸ್ಟರ್‌ ಕಿಶನ್‌ ಸಂದರ್ಶನ


8. ೮. ಮೈಸೂರಿನ ಬೆಣ್ಣೆ ಮಸಾಲೆ ದೋಸೆ.


9. ೯. ಕನ್ನಡ ಕಸ್ತೂರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ನೀವು ಕನ್ನಡ ಶಬ್ದಕೋಶವನ್ನು ನೋಡಬಹುದು.
   


10. ೧೦. ತಾಯಂದಿರ ದಿನ, ೨೦೦೮, ಅಂದರೆ ಮೇ ೧೧ ಅಥವಾ ಮೇ ತಿಂಗಳ ಎರಡನೇ ಭಾನುವಾರ.

As you can tell, I have not yet figured out how to produce Kannada numerals automatically within the ordered list. The other annoying thing is that, if you want to mix English and Kannada in the same blog post, you have to keep tweaking your Blogger.Settings.Basic. I have no doubt that will get fixed in the not too distant future: Google engineers can be relied upon to produce that.

Finally, Kannada publishing seems to be so enjoyable that I have started a new blog site exclusively devoted to blogging in Kannada.

Internet and Vedanta?

Yesterday, I caught the last few minutes of a chat session broadcast on one of the public television stations in the Silicon Valley (I don't remember the name of the station), about Deepak Chopra's book Life and Death.

During the Q & A session, Deepak Chopra discussed the impact of technology on promoting the idea of universal consciousness. As posted at the hyperlink of this post's title, "... the Internet is cloning our soul."

I couldn't help reflecting that Facebook, "Internet as a platform", Semantic Web, Web 2.0, etc., are foundational concepts for a richer society.