Floating Sun » Technology

Bitcasa: First Impressions

Diwaker Gupta — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:47:49 +0000

I got my invite for the Bitcasa beta last week but only got around to installing it yesterday. I’ve only used it sparingly thus far. If you are in a hurry, here’s the TL;DR version:

Users might find the “cloudify” model confusing
Built using osxfuse (not to be confused with MacFUSE) and Qt
Infinite storage sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?
Building trust with users will take time

Cloudification and Confusion

Here’s Bitcasa on what cloudify does:

When a folder is Cloudified, a corresponding virtual folder is created on the Bitcasa server and the contents of your local folder are copied up to the server. When Connected to the Bitcasa server, any changes or additions to the folder will live on the server. When not Connected to the Bitcasa server, any changes or addition to the folder will live locally.

Just think about that for a second. The “cloudify” model sounds great in principle, but it does add a lot of complexity in terms of how users interact with the system. For instance, when I’m offline and make changes to one of my cloudified folders, that change happens presumably locally. I would assume that when I come back online, these changes are synced back to Bitcasa ala Dropbox. But what if I accidentally disconnect a folder, make some changes and then reconnect — per the FAQ, the changes made locally won’t be synced.

The consumer cloud storage is fairly mature right now and one can learn a lot by looking at how people respond to other systems. This thread on Quora is particularly insightful: again and again, simplicity comes up as one of the key reasons behind Dropbox’s success.

My prediction is that Bitcasa’s cloudify feature will be leveraged primarily by power users and the rest would end up using the default Bitcasa folder, Dropbox style.

Nuts and Bolts

Bitcasa seems to be built primarily using Qt. This isn’t a surprise: Qt is a mature, open source and cross-platform library.

$ otool -L Bitcasa
Bitcasa:
 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)
 /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.5)
 /usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.8.dylib (compatibility version 0.9.8, current version 44.0.0)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/libmacfuse_i64.2.dylib (compatibility version 10.0.0, current version 2.0.0)
 /usr/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib (compatibility version 0.9.8, current version 44.0.0)
 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/CoreServices (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 53.0.0)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/QtWebKit.framework/Versions/4/QtWebKit (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/QtXml.framework/Versions/4/QtXml (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/QtGui (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/QtNetwork.framework/Versions/4/QtNetwork (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
 @executable_path/../Frameworks/QtCore.framework/Versions/4/QtCore (compatibility version 4.7.0, current version 4.7.4)
 /usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 52.0.0)
 /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1105.0.0)

$ mount
Sample Videos on /Users/diwaker/Bitcasa/Sample Videos (osxfusefs, nodev, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by diwaker)
TryBitcasa on /Users/diwaker/TryBitcasa (osxfusefs, nodev, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by diwaker)
TryBitcasaDedup on /Users/diwaker/TryBitcasaDedup (osxfusefs, nodev, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by diwaker)

Note further that Bitcasa represents “connected” folders as mount points over the existing folders. This is why when you disconnect a folder and make changes, they won’t propagate to Bitcasa’s copy of that folder. They are using osxfuse which implies that Bitcasa is intercepting file system calls; this is in contrast to Dropbox-like systems that detect changes to the local filesystem asynchronously. I haven’t compared fine-grained read/write performance just yet.

Here’s a snapshot of the Bitcasa Folders UI:

Bitcasa also does some deduplication. Uploading 100MB of mostly random data took around 4 minutes on a pretty fat pipe which isnt’ bad at all. Copying that data back out took just as long, if not longer. A copy of the same folder took less than 10 seconds to cloudify!

Security

Much has been said about Bitcasa’s security. However, most of the articles are concerned with a specific dimension of security: encryption.

A detailed discussion of Bitcasa’s security in general and encryption, in particular, deserves a post of its own. For now, suffice to say that even after several years of user experience, Dropbox still hit some pretty nasty security snafus in 2011. Like a lot of you, I’m very concerned about security, especially with a service that is offering me infinite storage for free! It takes time to build trust with your users — there’s no short cut.

Overall, Bitcasa is definitely interesting. Dropbox was almost beginning to monopolize the consumer cloud storage market, so some good competition will hopefully benefit the end users in the long run.

Whats with __MACOSX in Zip files?

Mac Tip: Get wifi password from another (connected) Mac

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 01:36:39 +0000

Here’s the situation: say you are at a friend’s place and as all responsible hosts, they have a password protected wifi network. Your friend is busy (or unavailable) so you can’t ask her for the password. Of course, you are known to not give up easily. You look around and realize: aha! someone else over there on the couch is busy with their laptop, so they must know the password. Unfortunately, they don’t. But the password must be somewhere on their laptop, since they are connected after all. So how do you find it?

OK, that probably sounds contrived. But the truth is that I did have the need to extract the wifi password from my wife’s laptop earlier today and thought I’d share the (pretty simple) process.

Step one: open keychain access

Step two: search for the network name (SSID)

Step three: check ‘Show password’ (you may need to enter your password first since this required Administrator privileges).

Voila!

Review of iPhone apps for Indian news

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:34:14 +0000

I like and use the iPhone apps for CNN, NYT and NPR news, but none of them are any good for staying up-to-date with happenings in India. So one day, out of curiosity, I started looking around for apps specifically for Indian news. Here’s what I found.

Summary: the NDTV app is probably one of the best free apps. I didn’t consider paid apps.

First, the usual suspects:

Times of India: The ToI app’s UI is functional, but otherwise not remarkable at a first glance. In true ToI tradition, the “Entertainment” section is feature prominently on the home page, just under top news. Of course, readers of ToI know that “Entertainment” and “Photos” are just euphemisms for soft porn — ToI happily parlays all kinds of NSFW material under the guise of “news”. I’m really curious to know how much of their app traffic (indeed, their website traffic) goes to the entertainment section.

The ToI App

Thankfully, buried under the “Settings”, the app allows reordering the various sections. You can also optionally specify a home city. I haven’t really used the Video section of the app, so can’t comment on it.

Overall, the app is not bad, but it can’t compensate for ToI’s reporting.

NDTV: The NDTV app feels only slightly more polished than the ToI app; structurally they’re quite similar and most differences are cosmetic. Unlike ToI though, NDTV’s Photos section is closer to what I’d expect on a news app (there’s still a heavy entertainment bias, of course).

But perhaps the most killer aspect of the NDTV app is that you can watch various channels of the NDTV group live!!

The NDTV App

The only downside of the NDTV app is that it shows a lot more ads than the other apps I looked at.

Hindustan Times: the HT app is probably not being actively developed — it still has a CWG section!! Other differentiators are a dedicated “Blogs” section. Compared to ToI and NDTV, this app offers basically no customization, no videos. The content is not as rich or fresh as the other apps.

The HT App

There were a lot of other news apps but none of them felt credible. The IBN Live app looked interesting but it seems to focus mostly on live TV and not news articles. For now, I’m sticking with the NDTV app.

What apps do you use to get your does of Indian news?

Some thoughts on iCloud

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:08:10 +0000

Sorry, all the sensationalist headlines were taken, so I had to pick something boring.

As we all know by now (read: probably 1% of the world’s population), at WWDC earlier this week, Apple spilled the beans on the upcoming iCloud, among other things. In this post, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the much hyped iCloud (not that there is any dearth of opinions and articles on the subject, thanks to the echo-chamber that is Twitterverse and Blogosphere)

First off, some quick bullets summarizing what it is:

iCloud aims to make cloud storage painless, the idea being that your data should be available to you from all your devices, all the time.
It’s automatic and transparent. Apple is baking iCloud support deep into 9 different applications: iTunes, Photo Stream, Apps, Books, Documents, Backup, Contacts, Calendar and Mail. And that’s just the beginning.
It’s free. Upto 5GB — excluding purchased music, books, apps and photo stream.
Sync over the air: iCloud can sync across devices over wireless. As a concrete example, you’ll no longer need a cable to sync and backup your iPhone with your laptop.

Here are some cool things about iCloud:

Scan and skip upload (iTunes only): when dealing with large data sets (such as your movies and music collection), one of the main impediments to using cloud storage is the overhead of doing the initial import. With a 1Mbps uplink, a 10GB music collection will take a full day to upload. Of course, if the file you are trying to upload already exists somewhere in the cloud, you don’t need to upload it and this is exactly what iCloud does. Because of the iTunes store, Apple already has a library of 18 million songs (and counting) and detecting if two files are for the same song is a lot easier than for many other media types (say images or movies).
Storage APIs for developers: APIs are all the rage these days. By exposing the right set of APIs, Apple could attract developers to build iCloud functionality on other platforms (Android, for example). Unfortunately, the API is fairly limited at this point (key-value store or documents).
HP, Teradata, maybe EMC are rumored to have supplied bulk of the hardware in the spanking new datacenter that will be the backbone for iCloud.
Despite all the hoopla around “cloud” recently, it was still grounded firmly within the tech circles. Apple has the ability, experience and motivation to take cloud computing truly mainstream with iCloud.

What is NOT so cool:

Apple has a habit of exaggerating the novelty and efficacy of their features (remember Spaces?) Scan and skip upload is nothing new: it is just deduplication under the wraps — a well known technique in storage systems. Videos and photos will still have to be uploaded though — there’s no real shortcut for those. Of course, there are techniques to dedup arbitrary data and I hope Apple is leveraging them.
In the same vein, syncing of Mail, Calendar and Contacts is just catch up. Ever used Google? Likewise for Docs and Books. The delivery model is different — Apple apps work with the local data and sync when there’s connectivity. They haven’t touched upon conflict resolution, disconnected clients etc.
Implications for Dropbox: transparent, automatic sync across multiple devices is a phenomenally hard problem. Apple makes it sound like they’ve nailed it. It took Dropbox several years to address all the performance and security concerns. I’d wager Apple will run into its share of snags along the way.
Apples all the way: despite their claims, iCloud is designed to lock you in. Sure you may be able to leverage some of the features by installing additional software on a PC. But unless you are using an Apple device, you won’t get the full experience or service. Want your “reading list” available on Android (or Chome, for that matter)? Tough luck. Want your music available to other music players (open source players like Banshee and Amarok, god forbid)? How about your photo stream in Picasa?

Finally, there’s no doubt that iCloud will drastically alter the cloud landscape. However, Apple is focused mainly on the personal cloud — which is a good thing, they are playing to their strengths. It is also a great opportunity because the enterprise cloud market is still wide open. The requirements, challenges and “killer apps” in that market are very very different than the personal/consumer cloud market. Should be fun!

The silent victories of open source

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 06:38:57 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

For years, free/libre/open source software (henceforth referred to as FLOSS) have proclaimed, year after year, how that year is the year of Linux, or the year that open source will become mainstream, or the year that open source will finally take off etc. But it never has, at least traditionally speaking. Linux based desktops haven’t penetrated either the enterprise or consumer markets; with a few notable exceptions (Apache httpd, for instance), most FLOSS products — be it office software like OpenOffice, multimedia software such as Gimp or Inkscape — remain popular with economically insignificant niches. And yet, this year, more than ever before, open source forges ahead with its silent victories.

Consider the following shifts:

all the top brands of the day — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — they ALL stand tall on the shoulders of FLOSS giants.
Contributing software back to the open source community is becoming increasingly common, even expected. Take a look at the GitHub repositories of Twitter and Facebook, or the various Google projects. In fact, when screening engineering candidates, I often look for and encourage people to talk about their open source contributions.
Most of the activity around “big data” and “cloud computing” is being driven in large part by FLOSS, whether it is the Hadoop-powered ecosystem or the Xen/Linux powered Amazon Web Services.
Given the current smartphone landscape, it is highly likely that Android will become ubiquitous on tablet devices and a variety of consumer smart phones. Already, Android has more search mindshare than Linux, despite the fact that Linux is part of the Android stack.
If you start a software company today, I would bet that you will find yourself bootstrapping almost entirely using open source software. The entire development process — from the GCC compiler toolchain, to the build systems, to the scripting languages, to the version control systems, to the code review systems, to the continuous integration systems — everything is dominated by FLOSS products. Good bug trackers and enterprise Wikis are the last bastions but it is just a matter of time.

I’ve had a chance to see the enterprise software market up close and increasingly find more and more open source everywhere I look. FLOSS has not arrived, it has taken over.

How do you use Twitter/Buzz/Facebook?

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:24:00 +0000

No no, I’m not late to the party and I’m not asking literally how does one use the above mentioned services. Rather, I’m asking how does one put these various services to use. When do you post something on Twitter but not on Buzz, Facebook but not on Twitter; or do you post everything everywhere (ping.fm style)? I’m not a heavy hitter by any means and my usage of social networks is mediocre at best. Yet I myself confounded with all of the various services and their accompanying warts and virtues. Don’t you?

To help sort out my thoughts, I drew a picture (don’t you dare judge me for my lack of creativity!):

Twitter/Facebook/Buzz

Below I elaborate more on how I currently use each of the services.

Twitter

I tend to use it for technical and/or non-personal content. Things that I would want to publicize.
Unlike Buzz/Facebook, I don’t pay too much attention to who is following me. Most tweets are public anyways.
The 140 character limit is sometimes amusing, but often irritating. Are people still using regular SMS with Twitter?
Multiple startups devoted to managing Twitter “noise” is not encouraging.
@ replies are bandaid. Twitter is a broadcast-and-forget medium — I can’t have (or follow) a conversation on it.

Facebook

Use it for sharing random, personal updates (or things I find interesting :p)
Mostly on because of network effect (read: don’t want to be left off the social bandwagon).
Like that I can “Like” most things and actually follow the conversation via comments.
Always worried if my privacy settings are working and if there’s a new “default” I need to worry about.
Pay more attention to who I friend. The noise level is still quite high despite that.

Buzz

Usage domain similar to that of Facebook. Unlike Facebook, can choose to make posts Public.
Love the email integration. Conversely, API/clients still have to catch up to Twitter.
Supports likes, comments and “resharing”.
Privacy is modeled around my contacts (chat or otherwise), which seems natural.

I’m fine with using Twitter for all of my public posts. The main confusion lies between Buzz and Facebook. Facebook obviously has more social traction. That said, Buzz is just more convenient to use (because of the email integration mostly). Of course, all of the various connectors available (Twitter <-> Buzz, Twitter <-> Facebook, multicast via ping.fm or Chromedeck etc) make the whole thing even more confusing. At the end of the day, I might just go back to not using anything on a regular basis.

How are you using Twitter, Buzz and Facebook?

Startup Infrastructure: Where Linux Fails

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:31:46 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

It is no secret that I’m an open source evangelist and so when it was time to set up internal infrastructure at work, naturally the first order of business was to evaluate the various OSS projects out there — everything from wikis, bug trackers, source control, code review and project management. Running Ubuntu LTS (10.04) on all of our servers was a no-brainer and there were plenty of excellent options for most everything else as well (a follow-up post on our final choices later). The Linux ecosystem is fabulous for most of the infrastructure needs of a startup, but I learnt the hard way that there are still some areas where Linux needs a lot of work before it can become competitive with proprietary, non-Linux solutions.

Authentication

Centralized account management (users and groups) and authentication is critical component in any IT deployment, no matter the size. Even for a small startup, creating users/groups repeatedly for each new server, separate authentication mechanisms for each new service is simply not scalable. That is precisely why Active Directory is so ubiquitous at enterprises.

LDAP was the obvious solution in Linux-land and I figured it would be trivial to setup an OpenLDAP server that can manage user/group information for us. It would also be the single authentication source for all servers and services. I was so wrong.

After struggling with OpenLDAP for several painful hours, I gave up — the documentation is fragmented, Google doesn’t help much and personally I think the LDAP creators had never heard of “usability” when designing it. The seemingly simple task of creating some new users and groups involved several black-magic incantations of the LDAP command line tools. Getting servers to authenticate against the resulting directory was even harder.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel and setup an AD instance in-house, I stumbled upon the 389 Directory Server (now known as the Fedora Directory Server). With a new found hope, I set about installing it on Ubuntu and hit another roadblock — there are no up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Reluctantly, I setup a Fedora instance (the only one so far) and installed FDS. Thankfully, Red Hat has put together really comprehensive documentation and guides for the Directory Server, which was invaluable.

From there on, it was mostly downhill (only a few minor hiccups). Finally we have a nice GUI to manage users and groups, and all servers/services authenticate against a single Directory Server. But the journey was unnecessarily painful. Here’s what I’d like to see:

Up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Sane defaults and functionality out-of-the-box
Ready to consume documentation on how to integrate LDAP with various web applications, Linux distros etc (I’ll put together some of this soon)
More awareness — I should have found FDS a lot sooner than I did, but it is certainly not very well marketed
Single sign on: This is a whole different beast

Remote Access

At my previous company, we had a Cisco VPN solution. There were plenty of Cisco compatible VPN clients on Windows and Mac. In fairness, it was relatively easy to get vpnc working on Ubuntu as well. In fact, with Network Manager, you can manage your VPN connections using a simple and intuitive UI. But the setup was not very reliable and my connections would get dropped relatively frequently. It was impossible to have a long-running VPN session without disruption. I’m not sure if the problem was with the Cisco hardware or the Ubuntu vpnc client; I did see similar issues with the built-in VPN client on Mac OS X.

But at least VPN on Linux works. I can’t say the same about other remote access mechanisms, in particular IPSec and L2TP over IPSec. It took me some time to figure out which package to use (Strongswan, Openswan, iked etc etc); another couple of hours to get the Openswan configuration just right; several hours of struggling to automatically setup DNS lookups when using the IPSec connection (gave up and ended up using entries in /etc/hosts!). There is no UI in Network Manager to manage IPSec connections either. Strongswan does have a NM plugin, but that only works for IKEv2 (certificate based authentication), while I had to use IKEv1 (shared key based authentication).

At the end of the day, I do have a working IPSec tunnel and it is definitely more reliable than the Cisco VPN (been up for more than 2 days without disruption). But all this can and should become a lot more seamless.

These are a few areas where Linux failed me in setting up the infrastructure for a startup; it shines most everywhere else. Hopefully these last few kinks will get ironed out soon.

Observations from The Social Network

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:44:58 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

The Social Network is rather like a fast paced documentary. The content, production value and background scores were great. I really enjoyed the bit around the Harvard boat race — a nice piece of whitespace in the movie :) But this post is not about these aspects; rather I wanted to make a few observations about the several tiny tid-bits of open source sprinkled throughout the movie.

wget makes several appearances in a short segment of the movie where Mark is scraping the Harvard intranet for the seed data for various precursors to Facebook. To my relief, everything I saw seemed very real and plausible unlike, say, the hackery mumbo-jumbo in Matrix or (gasp) Swordfish. Nonetheless, I did not see (and have not seen) any evidence that Mark Zuckerberg is the programming genius that most reviews and synopsis claim. Of course, programming genius has no correlation with being successful (read: being the youngest billionaire)
The usage of Emacs, Perl and curl were also faithful. The emphasis should be on Zuck’s intuition about the idea and his ability to prototype quickly. The technology itself was something any script kiddy could have come up with.
Zuck is shown running KDE 3 on his workstation. Again, the attention to detail is impressive. KDE 3 was around the same time as the early years of Facebook development.

The Social Network

There were a few more things, but I saw the movie several weeks ago and the details are fuzzy in my head. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the veracity of the movie’s substance, I found this Gigaom post useful.

Reclaim the TV

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:07:18 +0000

Do you:

wonder who watches all of the 700+ channels that you get from your cable provider?
wonder why you are paying more than $50/month for all those channels, when you only watch a handful?
find yourself channel surfing, just because you can, not because you know what you want to watch?
feel like you are not getting the most out of your TV?
feel like you can’t wait for Google TV or the Boxee box to improve your television experience?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I have a few tips for you. There have been times when I spent an hour flipping through channels, not really watching anything in particular, and later feeling like an idiot for having wasted my time. All this while I just accepted that cable TV as a given, an inevitable companion of our internet service provider… until I met a few friends who were perfectly happy without any cable service.

With that inspiration, I started looking around for a better TV experience. There is so much content available online (and good content!) that I wasn’t really worried about lack of material to watch. Both Google TV and the Boxee box seemed very promising (not to mention, the new Apple TV). There were two little problems:

Neither Boxee box nor Google TV are here yet, and
All of these devices have very very limited functionality. They address the problem of Internet TV, but I don’t want to use my TV to just watch TV. I want it to become a hub for all my media. I want to access my local music, photos, videos and more.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do — I built my own media center PC. It runs Ubuntu; it hosts all my media in a single location; it serves as media server and storage server; and it serves as a compute server when I have to transcode media. You can find all the gory details in this guide: HOWTO Build an Ubuntu based media center.

No related posts.

And just like that, I’m a GNOME user

Diwaker Gupta — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 06:21:59 +0000

When I first started using Linux (more than a decade ago), I did my share of playing around with various desktop environments: the classic FVWM, GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment etc. I settled down with KDE. Over the years, I kept coming back to GNOME to check it out but somehow KDE always felt home to me.

Well guess what, not any more. As of a few days ago, I’m (mostly) a GNOME user.

I still love KDE (the desktop) and KDE based applications (KMail, Amarok etc). It is still infinitely more configurable than anything comparable in GNOME (Evolution and Thunderbird are still fairly limited in comparison) and over the years I’ve tweaked it to just the way I like it. But GNOME has something the KDE project does not: Canonical.

Thats right, I switched to GNOME because of Canonical, the company that drives Ubuntu development. Sure, there is a lot of effort behind the various Ubuntu variants such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. But make no mistake, none of these variants are first-class citizens in the Ubuntu ecosystem.

The switch was a result of my recent experience setting up Ubuntu on my home theater PC. The effort Canonical has put into making the Ubuntu experience more seamless and pleasant is clearly visible. Pretty much everything works out of the box: folders that I share show up on other computers in my home network, bluetooth/webcam etc all work just fine, setting up remote desktop is a breeze and so on, Avahi/bonjour works like a charm; I can setup a DAAP server to share my music and it shows up on iTunes just like that.

Note that all of these things are obviously not limited to Ubuntu in any way. But the user experience in Ubuntu is unparalleled in comparison with Kubuntu etc. Subtle niceties like the notifications (the Ayatana project), the Me menu, the messaging menu, the “light” themes etc. come together in a very cohesive way to deliver an experience that rivals that of Mac OS. But beyond the subtleties, Canonical is shaping the future of Linux on the desktop, laptop and mobile devices: the Unity interface, multi-touch support for mobile devices and more. Bottomline: having a company put its weight behind a desktop has ramifications.

So as much as I love thy, KDE, for now we shall part ways. I’m still using some KDE apps (like digiKam), but until Canonical decides to officially adopt Kubuntu, GNOME it is.