Rajan's View

The world at large has been going through a phase of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Some say that this is the new "normal". Although, this term was initially coined by the US Army War College, it applies to the world of business and markets as well. As a result, the VUCA conditions impose more strain on IT departments to deliver solutions that are sustainable and flexible. There are several structured techniques one can employ to manage this scenario. One of the techniques is called - "Nine Windows". This technique looks at two dimensions - time and space. The time represented as past, present and future. The space dimension is modelled as - super system, system and sub system. Nine Windows As an IT architect, a lot of my time is spent working with teams on solution architecture and implementation. Sometimes, when there are several or competing options available, I use this technique. Typically, there is a tendency to focus

I recently participated in a Hackathon organized at my company. While, I am not at liberty to tell what the hack was, I can share the experience though. We all usually have ideas brimming about how we could improve or change things. A lot of times, one does not get the time to act on those ideas. Sometimes, these ideas require time, people, resources, money etc.  Our Hackathon got off to a great start with music by Daft Punk - 'Doin it Right'. It certainly set the tempo. Focus It is easy to get carried away with the ideas. Learn to focus on the idea. Once, you have something in mind, explore it in more detail and flesh it out. Bounce the idea around with different people to get various perspectives. Perhaps, you may fall in love with the it or just drop it. If you must, fail quickly and learn from it. Team Unless, you are planning to go it solo, get a great team. Ensure that there are diverse skills, experiences, even temperaments. The most fun you will ha

In the world of services, a challenge we will face is the granularity of a service. As a principle, it is recommended that a service should be granular. As more and more services are built, this allows developers to 'compose' or 'combine' the services to achieve a desired feature. But, this has a potential pitfall. Often, there may be a need to combine the services  in a certain way. The options are either to modify the service or to have another service on that does the ​aggregation. There are pros and cons both ways. Here is an interesting example from 3Scale - http://3scale.github.io/2013/04/18/accelerate-your-mobile-api-with-nginx-and-lua/ . And, an equally interesting article on being pragmatic vs dogmatic - http://dlo.me/archives/2013/04/16/there-is-no-right-way-to-develop-software/ . If  you are building services/API, there may well be a case for sometimes being pragmatic or dogmatic or both! You may need to evaluate each scenario on a cas

As we enter the peak shopping period across some countries around the world, competition is increasing to capture customer's attention. For the past few years, there have been various techniques used in online, mobile trading channels​ to attract customers. Companies have resorted to building widgets, affiliate tools, price comparison websites/apps etc. The impact of 'showrooming' is only becoming too apparent in markets around the world. Recently, the 'pitch' to the customer is getting even more aggressive. Some recent notable developments - Windows 8 allows searching within applications (through the charms feature) - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/charms#1TC=t1 Amazon Search now baked into latest version (12.10) of free operating system Ubuntu - http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/11/how-to-install-a-dedicated-amazon-shopping-lens-in-ubuntu In some countries, default homepage of Mozilla Firefox browser has link to shopping add-on

In my previous article , I compared the evolution of google and bing. Now, google seems to be going deeper into it's knowledge graph.  The changes are becoming apparent for multi-word searches where a context can be derived. Try searching for  'daniel day lewis movies', 'tolkien books', 'murugan idli shop in chennai', 'london theatres'. The search results are completely transformed. I have to admit, I personally like the results. The results have a bit more coherence and context, not just a list of links to sites.  Search results from google.com on 27-November-12. Click image to zoom. As with everything, there are both pros and cons to the knowledge graph. Pros: Use curated content in the knowledge graph to offset the current lack of integration with popular social networking sites like twitter and facebook. Mitigate the risk of content moving behind paywalls (example - news) or state intervention (as being proposed in France, Ge

For those who remember the early days of the internet, they will be familiar with the free web hosting sites like Geocities. Before Geocities was taken offline, it's content was archived and is now available for download as a 650 GB torrent. While this seems like a large amount of data, it is estimated that around 2,551,568,697 GB data per day was created in 2011! While the earlier days of the internet were largely image and text based content,  data today is in the form of images, text, social media posts, videos, businesses, services and user generated content. All this only increases our dependency on search engines. More than the challenge of indexing all the data, search engines are starting to grapple with relevancy of results. The added complication is that some of the social media and other sites are not publicly available to be indexed. The two main search engines - Google and Bing seem to be taking markedly different approaches. Fundamentally, the approach is relyin

Posted by Rajan Manickavasagam May 15th, 2012 Designing Great Data Products Rating: 3 out of 5 Image: O'Rielly Many companies and commentators highlight the growing data that is created and consumed everyday. I was naturally curious to understand more about how companies can use all this data to their advantage. I came across this book - 'Designing Great Data Products' in O'Reilly. The title sounded great, but to my disappointment, it is a short book. I anyway went ahead and read the book.The authors of the book are folks from kaggle , a company specialising in statistics and analytics. The book mainly talks about an approach called 'DriveTrain'. This  approach is about using data to drive actions. The 'DriveTrain' approach consists of 4 steps - Define a clear objective - I like this one. Please refer my previous post about problem definition . Levers - Identify the systems, processes etc that can be controlled. Data

I chose the word friction deliberately for the title of the post. More on that later. Let me first explain what I mean by control, content and connections. Photo by  Paulo Barcellos Jr.     Control This is the ability by which people are going to control their access to all things digital and more. By digital, I mean - web, media and communication. Control is today offered by various devices - mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop, TV, music players and so on. The major manufacturers of these devices are technology and consumer appliance companies like Apple and Samsung. More and more, these devices are not tied into any specific kind of content or connection.Within the control space, there are those who provide just the hardware or software or both. Apple has always done both. The Microsoft-Nokia partnership, Google-Motorola acquisition, Samsung points to a trend that companies want to follow that model. Companies that do only one of them are at risk of being left out. Ther

We have seen the world of services evolve taking many shapes and forms like SOA, REST and API's. REST seems to be on the way to becoming the de-facto language of the internet. Most often, we create application and business layer in Services and API's. However, the data layer continues to be tightly bolted with the database. There are now some alternatives emerging. There is an open source (MIT License) data access layer called restSQL . restSQL Architecture (source: www.restsql.org) Once set-up, it will provide a REST based access to the database. This means that all the SQL statements like insert, select, update, delete etc can be executed using HTTP GET's  and POST's. Like any other REST service, it provides a platform agnostic method of accessing the database. Since it is hosted as a web application, it can be scaled and managed like any other web application. Lastly, one needs to update the database drivers and configuration only in this layer a

Google has recently been in the news for their latest update to search, called 'Search plus your world'. It is about showing google plus results in the search results. After the launch of google plus, it was inevitably going to be linked in with search.  However, on the personal search space, there has been another startup making news. It's called - greplin - www.greplin.com . 'Grep' is from the old unix command. It is a 'freemium' service and the free features are quite enough for most users. You can link all your online accounts and all the information - mails, contacts, documents, tweets, facebook posts, dropbox and so on. Overview: The centre of the page holds a search box along with a filter option. On the left, all your linked accounts and status show up. Above the search box, is the size of your personal index. There is an iphone app also available. With each of us using many online services (facebook, linkedin, twitte

Posted by Rajan Manickavasagam December 26th, 2011 News 360 Rating: 4 out of 5 I think, one of the habits we all have is reading news or other articles on the net. Generally people use their browser to read the news. This year has seen a lot of mobile and tablet apps launched in the market. One of the leading apps is of course, Flipboard. But it's available only in the iOS platform for now. In the other mobile platforms, we have apps like Pulse, Feedly and the latest entrant - Google Currents. For me, the one app that stands out is News360. Depending on your platform, download the app from your respective app store. When it starts, it shows all the latest news across various categories like World, Politics, Technology etc. But here comes the interesting part, you can personalize it by connecting your online profiles like Facebook, Google Reader, Evernote and Twitter. The app analyses all your activity and other information and then personalizes the news for

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Ever since the launch of Siri on the new iPhone 4S, there has been a lot of talk about it being a competition for search engines and therefore Google. However, I hope and wish Google and Apple treat the two differently. And, here is why. I see Google largely as an 'information broker'. The search is brilliant and gets you to what you are looking for. And, if you are signed in, Google then makes the search experience more personalized and contextual. As a natural extension of the search capability, voice is already there but obviously not at the same level as Siri. With more information being created each day as well as the variety of devices being used to access the information, Google should continue to improve the core search. I think there is still a lot more to be done in the search algorithm, incorporating social signals and the different user experiences. For example, if I search for 'data visualization',

Here is a simple sample program for accessing a MongoDB database. In order to run the sample, you will need the following - PHP server 5.x running on IIS/Apache  MongoDB database  MongoDB driver for PHP  You could easily write the same program using .NET program and driver too. Hopefully, the comments in the program are self-explanatory. Happy coding and exploring!

​As promised, here are the results of the database shoot out between MongoDB and SQL Server. Before we get into the results, a few things worth noting. The objective of the performance test is a simple use case - search data based on some keys. I have a few self imposed principles to ensure that the test is fair and square - Use the standard configuration for the databases so that it's a fair comparison. Exactly the same data loaded into both the databases, including creating the same kind of indexes too. Exactly the same queries and parameters used for both the databases. Exactly the same client used to execute the queries against both the databases. The same kind of OS and underlying hardware (CPU, RAM etc). There are 3 separate database servers that have been used here. They are - Server 1 - Windows 2008 R2 (64 bit) physical server running MongoDB (64 bit). Server 2 - Windows 2008 R2 (64 bit) virtual server running MongoDB (64 bit). Server 3 - Windows 2008 R2 (

I started looking at various NOSQL databases like Hbase, CouchDB and MongoDB. I finally settled on MongoDB, mainly because it was easy to setup in Windows. The name Mongo is derived from 'humongous', interesting name! For more details, you can refer - http://www.mongodb.org . As it says on the website, it is very easy to setup and highly scalable. Here are my first set of statistics - Time to download the software (64 bit edition) - 2 minutes Time to setup the database - 2 minutes Time to get the database up and running - 1 minute And, this is where I found the database to be refreshing. It is quick, even to setup, leave alone processing of data! Overall, I found these to be key features of this database - Light foorprint. Easy to setup either single or replicated instances and to administer. Schema-free data storage. In other words, there is no need to define any data structure. Incredibly quick for reads and writes. Map Reduce (with Javascript). Very

Several people and organizations have cited the growing size and consumption of data in the current digital age. I have deliberately used the word 'digital' instead of 'internet'. There is growing convergence of internet, media (video, audio) and devices. One can today, browse a newspaper on a Smart TV and conversely view a movie on a phone or tablet. There is of course the 'social' chatter on sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to name a few. The implication of all this is of course transmission and storage of data. I am going to cover the latter aspect in this series of articles. I have worked on various RDBMS starting from databases like SQL Server, Oracle and right up to DB2 and Teradata. I have always been curious about how data and it's application. So, I have been researching on some of the technologies that power large scale data. A key component has been the rising use 'NOSQL' databases. The NO - doesn't stand for No as in Dr

Just read about the Google Blogger Dynamic Views. It is about changing the look and feel of a blog with new templates. I think blogging just became a whole lot more eye candy! For now the templates are simple and do not offer a lot of customizations, so a lot of my old clutter is gone. I like all the new templates. I have enabled the 'Magazine' template as default on this site now. Of course the readers can modify the layout (on the top left menu) to what they like. For those who are technically inclined, welcome to the world of HTML5. I think in the past few years we have seen a lot of hype around mobile apps, now looks like slowly HTML5 is gaining  momentum. The advantage of course being that you don't have to keep building separate apps for each mobile platform. I tried this site on the iPad, but currently it looks like only the desktop browsers are supported for now. On the mobiles, this site is set for simplified a mobile experience. I have chosen dark theme for

There has been a flurry of news and coverage on Amazon's new devices and services. We have Amazon entering the tablet market with Kindle Fire, as it has been speculated for quite some time now. It's interesting to see how they are subsidizing the tablet to lock in customers to TV shows and movies from Amazon Prime. It poses a direct threat to the likes of netflix, blinkbox. I suppose watch this space as competition hots up in the online digital media segment. In the long term, going to a multiplex may be as rare as visiting the west end for theatre. One of the features being touted on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is the 'Silk' browser. Silk uses the Amazon cloud to speed up the browsing, which is great. It's similar to Opera Mini and SkyFire in that sense. I suppose the key is that there are many websites hosted on Amazon cloud, making the browsing that much faster.  However, on the down side, it raises privacy concerns for the customers. By and large

This is a belated review about one of the early tablets. It is called Adam. And befitting it's name, it's the world's first tablet which can function both as a tablet and an ebook reader. It runs on Android, no surprises there. The specs of the tablet are good - Tegra2 dual-core 1 Ghz CPU, ULP GPU, 1 GB RAM, Expandable SD and USB slots, GPS, Compass, Bluetooth, Accelerometer, Wifi (3G model available too). There is only one camera but it swivels to face both front and back! The most interesting feature is the 10.1" Pixel Qi screen. This screen is a translfective display. You can notice the difference in the screenshots below. The screen can work in dual mode as a LCD and without backlight (like an ebook reader). Battery life currently lasts for a couple of days, should be more given the screen capabilities. One can use the screen without backlight not just in the Kindle app but even in other apps like Gmail etc. Screen with backlight ON Screen with backl

In the week gone by, two events happened. One was really a big deal in a lot of different ways, and that's the Microsoft-Skype deal. The other not-so-big deal was from Google, on the launch of the Chromebook. The big deal I personally think more than the money Microsoft is going to pay for Skype, there are other factors in play. 1. Skype is a well established company/product in the VOIP market. It has a few hundred million customers all over the world. As smartphones continue their onslaught all over the world, it is a matter of time before Skype-like services eat into the traditional telecom operators share. 2. Microsoft earlier got into a tie-up with Nokia. With Windows Phone 7 still receiving a lukewarm response compared to the iPhone and Android hype, deals with companies like Skype and Nokia are increasing the chance of Windows succeeding in in the mobile arena. Of course it is going to take time to integrate all the various services and the hardware. 3. While smartph