Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

I’ve heard about KhanAcademy.org a few times since about 2009-2010.  But I haven’t really explored it or learned much about it.  It was just one of those “good things” on the Internet, which was about education and which was a not-for-profit.  And now I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on it.  Wikipedia page describes the project in a rather dry language:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Indian American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”, the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,800 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, american civics, art history, microeconomics and computer science.

There you go.  A cheese slogan, a single guy, a bunch of videos on YouTube – what’s all the big fuss about, right?  Wrong!  Here is a better way to get introduced to the project – a TED talk by Salman Khan.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk]

Continue reading Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

The history of Page.ly

I came across an excellent “behind the curtains” series of blog posts, telling the fascinating story of the Page.ly project.  Page.ly is a user-friendly WordPress hosting, providing hassle-free setup and configuration of WordPress websites.  I haven’t used the service myself – being a fan of WordPress I do enjoy diving into the code and learning the details – but I’ve heard a few good words about it.

For me personally, the interest in this story is not only in technology, but also in the ways of thinking.   Running a profit-oriented company (and a small start-up at that) on and around Open Source Software is guaranteed to provide a number of challenges – from competition and marketing to community managing.   And even though there are many companies that do business around Open Source Software, an insight into ways of thinking, the system of values, and into specific challenges is rare.  Building Page.ly series has plenty.

In 2010 we saw the arrival of a handful of what most would refer to as competitors, it was inevitable. We did the hard part proving the space had legs and there was revenue to be made. And no good idea goes un-copied for long. We were also starting to make a name for ourselves in the WordPress community and that helped quite a bit to get the word out.

A couple interesting points regarding these new arrivals. At SXSW in 2010 I went to the WordPress BBQ at a co-working space in Austin where I handed out a few shirts and were talking to folks about what Page.ly was. One fellow I distinctly remember talking to must have really been listening, a few months later he was a co-founder of a competing company. Around the time this company was launching their other co-founder solicited us about using our technology to power their new offering rather than ‘re-inventing’ the wheel. I was amicable to the idea (fits squarely with our collaboration over competition philosophy) and agreed to a phone conversation which never took place. They decided to roll their own and off they went.

One of the other new players was not happy merely re-factoring our idea, but went so far as to be heavily ‘inspired’ by our marketing to the point I had to have a private conversation with them about the overt similarities between our website copy.

At the end of the day, we did not then and we still do not see any of these chaps as competitors at all. We work from a mindset that with 30+ million WordPress powered sites out there the space is deep enough to support 5-10 page.ly’s and we rather pull clients over from the econo-hosts like bluehost, mt, and godaddy. 

Inspirational and insightful, to say the least.  Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

Lyne Perinciolo Duluc

I’m not a big fan of abstract art, not in painting, not in photography, not in sculpture.  But once in a while something catches my eye and doesn’t let it go.  And that’s exactly what happened in one of the offices I currently work.   There is a bunch of paintings (reproductions?) and photographs on the walls.  Most of them are just fine, but I particularly liked this one.

Of course, it looks way better in real life than on this tiny JPEG.  But technology isn’t all that bad.  In fact, while I was looking at this painting, I was trying to figure out how can I find out the name of the artist and see more of his or her works.  That’s when Google Goggles for Android came to the rescue.  I snapped a quick picture, and a few seconds later my mobile told me that this is a painting by Lyne Perinciolo Duluc.  There is not much in terms of biography of her’s on the web, but there is plenty of her other works.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun.  It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014.  While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding  around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage.  I thought that was a bit excessive.  After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk.  Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing.  How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.  Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book.  How much space is there on a modern hard drive?  I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes).  How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000.  I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes.  But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order.  3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already.  By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that.  Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home.  New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here.  It read more like:

  • 600,000 books (print)
  • 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
  • 10,000 audio books (digital)
  • 150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots.  But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line.  Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world?  Especially now that we do have the technology.

The permanence of temporary

I came across this little story about the Gmail logo.

How many times have you been told not to leave something for the last minute, but when you did, it actually turned out better than expected? Well, Gmail’s logo was the product of this situation — it was designed by Dennis Hwang (who’s responsible for most of Google’s doodles at the time) the night before Gmail launched. Former Google designer Kevin Foxtells the story on Quora: “The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.”

The last minute bit reminded me of something else.  A few years ago I was involved in a project with a rather hectic release plan.  There was too much work to do, not enough organization, and the deadline appeared much sooner than expected.  The team was in the office pretty much since Friday afternoon and it was already just after 11pm on Sunday night.  Everyone was stressed and exhausted, and we thought that the painful release of the project was just about done.

It was then that we got a report from the support department that something is wrong with our outgoing emails.  And the problem was that they weren’t going out much.  Clients submitted forms and were told to expect activation / verification email with code.  And those emails weren’t coming for a while already.

It was then that we realized that in all the chaos we actually completely forgot to implement that bit functionality.  There was nothing there that was sending emails.  Oops!

I kicked everyone out of the room, locked the door and wrote a very quick Perl script.  I spent not more than 15-20 minutes.  We just needed something really quick to get the mail queue out of the way.  We would rewrite it properly next day, when the dust settles a bit and everyone is rested and thinking clearly.

Can you guess when we actually rewrote it?  One and a half years later!  That’s  right!  Something as temporary as that lasted and did the job for almost two years.  Turned out that the job I wrote it to do on the first night was pretty much the job it would be doing 24×7, and there was no need to even update it.  It supported templates, multiple languages, and pre-configured attachments based on the template and language.  And it was efficient enough, since when I was writing it we already had a few thousand messages in the queue and I wanted to send them out as quick as possible.

Even later, when the rewrite happened, it wasn’t for any new functionality, but for better integration with the rest of the project.  After all, it doesn’t make much sense to have a single standalone Perl script in the project that is completely written PHP.  It was ported almost verbatim.

Every time I tell this story, especially to my Russian friends, I keep hearing the same response: “Nothing is more permanent than temporary“.  You build something to last for years and it gets destroyed, redesigned, and rebuilt every 6 month.  You throw something together to get you through the day and that lasts a century.

The Gmail logo reminded me of that.  Designed on the night before the release, the logo is still here…