But the Make model is rife with problems. Here are a few of them:

• Make requires the use of its own domain specific language — this is, in general, not a good idea. Have you looked at any sizable project’s Makefile lately? Its hard to understand, and harder to modify.
• In the same vein, autoconf/automake are notoriously hard to use. Bear in mind that these tools are supposed to make your life easier.
• Makefile are so hard to write and extend that several popular build systems today are essentially Makefile generators. A good example is CMake.
• Make relies heavily on file timestamps to detect changes.
• Make is slow.
• Makefile are not modular. Recursive Make is especially evil.
• …

I recently began work on a new pet project. As is usually the case, I spent a lot more time figuring out what tools and libraries I would use for my project, than in actually writing any code for the project :) Part of the investigation was to survey the state of the art in build systems. At work, we started using SCons for most of our build, which was already a huge improvement over Make. But SCons has its own set of issues.

One of the nicest features in SCons is that build files are regular Python files. This provides enormous flexibility and immediate familiarity. Unfortunately, the SCons documentation leaves much to be desired. I still don’t quite understand the execution model of SCons very well. For instance, I know how to extend SCons to support cross-compilation for multiple platforms. However, I don’t really understand why those modifications work — there’s quite a bit of black magic that goes on behind the scenes. As a concrete example, there are several magic variables such _LIBDIRFLAGS that have strange powers.

Waf

After some more looking around, I discovered Waf. And now that I’ve played around with it a little bit, I’m happy to say that it is the most pleasant build system I’ve ever used. Things I really like about Waf:

• The execution model just makes sense to me. You typically build a project in phases: there’s a configure phase, to sort out dependencies, tools etc; there’s the actual build phase; and then there’s the install phase. It is not uncommon to have a ‘dist’ step as well, to prepare the source for distribution. Waf understands these operations as first class entities. There is a very strong notion of workflow built into Waf.
• Comprehensive documentation. Check out the Waf book and the wiki.
• Waf has a very strong task model. There is a much stronger notion of dependencies (powered by content hashes, not timestamps). Waf also enforces that all generated code lands up in a separate “build” directory, so your source tree always remains clean.
• Using waf is a breeze — there are no big dependencies, no packages to install, no bloated software to include with your code. Just a single 80kb script.
• Progress indication and colored output is built in, not an after thought. Like SCons, Waf build files are regular Python files.
• Waf is fast. Faster than SCons.

Of course, Waf is not perfect. Coming from a Make/SCons world, I sorely miss the ability to build specific targets. Yes there are ways to achieve this in Waf, but they are all clumsy. The API documentation (and the source itself) are a bit hard to parse.

Related posts:

1. gooLego: Google’s software building blocks
2. darcs status?
3. Vim and the future of editors

I thought I had attained screen nirvana… until I found tmux (hat tip xed). So what exactly is tmux?

tmux is intended to be a modern, BSD-licensed alternative to programs such as GNU screen. Major features include:

• A powerful, consistent, well-documented and easily scriptable command interface.
• A window may be split horizontally and vertically into panes.
• Panes can be freely moved and resized, or arranged into one of four preset layouts.
• Support for UTF-8 and 256-colour terminals.
• Copy and paste with multiple buffers.
• Interactive menus to select windows, sessions or clients.
• Change the current window by searching for text in the target.
• Terminal locking, manually or after a timeout.
• A clean, easily extended, BSD-licensed codebase, under active development.

And how is tmux better than screen? Thats question #1 in the FAQ:

tmux offers several advantages over screen:

- a clearly-defined client-server model: windows are independent entities which may be attached simultaneously to multiple sessions and viewed from multiple clients (terminals), as well as moved freely between sessions within the same tmux server;

- a consistent, well-documented command interface, with the same syntax whether used interactively, as a key binding, or from the shell;

- easily scriptable from the shell;

- multiple paste buffers;

- choice of vi or emacs key layouts;

- an option to limit the window size;

- a more usable status line syntax, with the ability to display the first line of output of a specific command;

- a cleaner, modern, easily extended, BSD-licensed codebase.

There are still a few features screen includes that tmux omits:

- builtin serial and telnet support; this is bloat and is unlikely to be added to tmux;

- wider platform support, for example IRIX and HP-UX, and for odd terminals.

Related posts:

1. Tools I use: screen
2. Center screen on current line
3. darcs status?

First, let us recap some basic requirements:

• Security: this is a no-brainer. If I’m going to trust my passwords to a software, it better be secure. In particular, the developer/owners of the software should not be able to look at my passwords.
• Online and offline access: I want access to my password regardless of whether or not I have internet connectivity. I should also be able to get to my passwords from any of my devices from anywhere in the world. This usually translates to a web-based system where passwords are stored at some server(s) in the “cloud”.
• Export: My password data is mine and mine alone, and I want to be able to export it out of the system (for personal backups, for instance).
• Desktop, Tools, API: I would prefer an open system, one that provides rich access interfaces. I’d love to have a desktop app, plugins for Do or QuickSilver etc. You get the idea.
• Simple to use: The password manager should not get in my way. Adding new passwords should be a breeze. Using stored passwords should be equally simple. Ideally, I shouldn’t even notice that I’m using a web-based password manager and not the stored passwords from my browser.

Without further ado, here are the top three web-based password managers.

clipperz

If you are really paranoid about security, clipperz might be a good option. clipperz is open-source, so you can audit the code yourself should you so desire. It is also a measure of confidence from clipperz — by revealing their source code, they are basically saying, “Hey, we are clean, you can check us out yourself”. It also signals that clippers does not believe in security by obscurity. Apart from being open source, clipperz has all the other expected goodies: you can export your data, it supports one-click logins, you can download an offline copy etc.

I personally did not end up using clipperz because a variety of small problems: I did not like the interface; when I started using clipperz, the one-click login was barely functional; and overall I found the user experience of PassPack much better (read below).

PassPack

PassPack is the first web-based password manager that I used seriously, and so far it has worked out great! The team is very responsive and constantly rolling out new features. I think PassPack did a really good job of promoting and educating the public on “host-proof hosting“, meaning that even the service provider does not have access to your data. This is something that most web-based password managers now support, but at least in my mind, PassPack really led the way in terms of awareness.

Some features that really drew me to PassPack: password tagging; I can mark certain passwords as “favorites” so they are loaded first; the two-level security; the desktop app based on Adobe AIR; the ability to store arbitrary notes (such as routing numbers or PINs). PassPack is particularly well-suited for groups. You can share passwords in a secure manner with people in your group. Recently they even added a feature to allow sending passwords securely via email. Now you no longer need to copy/paste your passwords into chats and emails.

What I always missed in PassPack was browser integration and seamless one-click login. With the PassPack bookmarklet, one-click login is almost seamless, but it never worked very well for me. For some websites it just won’t work. For others I’d have to re-login into my PassPack account. Yet other times there the bookmarklet would work in one browser but not in another. At the end of the day, it was just becoming cumbersome to manage multiple copies of my passwords — one in each of the browsers I used on each of my devices, and one in PassPack.

LastPass

I recently discovered LastPass, and right now it is my favorite tool. I found it via its Chrome extension, which is when I realized that they have plugins for Firefox and work with pretty much all the good browsers on all the major platforms. I have to admit though, LastPass is nowhere close to PassPack in terms of the maturity of the UI and the overall user experience. But the killer feature for me was browser integration. With LastPass, adding new websites is exactly like Firefox asking you to store password information for a website. In fact, the FireFox plugin for LastPass allows you to disable and bypass the Firefox password manager altogether. When you come to a website that has already been stored in LastPass, it will fill out your username and password just like your browser would do. No need to click on a bookmarklet or any thing else. Transparent, seamless integration.

Unlike PassPack, LastPass has no group features at this point, which is perfectly fine by me. In the words of Tara Kelly, a co-founder of PassPack:

Passpack is pwd mngr with sharing & workgroups. Lastpass is login tool for individuals. Different strokes 4 different folks.

If there is a better web-based password manager out there that you know of, I’d love to hear about it.

Related posts:

1. Web based password manager
2. Web services I wouldn’t mind paying for
3. Secure passwords: the other side of the story

A republic is a form of government in which the head of state is not a monarch and the people (or at least a part of its people) have an impact on its government. The word ‘republic’ is derived from the Latin phrase res publica, which can be translated as “a public affair”

Me and my friends grew up with (very fond memories of) a particular video created by Doordarshan called “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara”:

Apparently there is a new version out now:

I for one find the old one still more charming. The new ones are a bit too long and they have way too many actors/actresses with voiceover by playback singers — I’d much rather see the playback singers themselves, as it is the Bollywood stars get way too much attention.

Happy Republic Day!

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1. Happy Diwali
2. (Happy) New Year?
3. “Happy” Birthday

I’m really blown away by AT&T’s recent commercials attacking Verizon. I’d like to point out that for better or for worse, I’m currently stuck with AT&T (and have been for the past 5 years), so believe me, I’d love to see AT&T succeed in earnest. But looking at these ads, I can’t help but wonder — just how stupid does AT&T think we are?

Consider, for instance, the famous “headless” commercial:

Exactly what does “downloading myself” mean? Anyone can make a video like this but unless you have numbers and real demos to back it up, its just hogwash. Here is what I consider a realistic download test:

And then there is the “two phones” ad:

All AT&T is saying here is that look, we are cool because we have iPhone? Will someone from AT&T put down on paper their claim that you just can’t talk and surf on Verizon at the same time? It is obvious that this is merely a property of the phone itself, not the network. Verizon is going to get iPhone 4G later year — then what? And upcoming Android based phones are already showing how lame this claim really is.

It is clear that the “maps” commercials from Verizon did not go down with AT&T and this is just a knee-jerk reaction. The difference is, the Verizon commercials actually make a very valid point.

Seriously AT&T, you can do better than this. Looking at these ads just makes me frustrated and shows how less you really care about your customers. Pretty much everyone who actually uses cellphones agrees that Verizon has better coverage and in general better speed than AT&T in most areas. I mean forget about small-town US. I’m talking San Francisco downtown — the AT&T coverage and 3G speeds are just pathetic.

No related posts.

A good plotting library

Don’t even mention gnuplot. Not only is it old school (how many times have you looked at a graph in a paper and just known that it was produced using gnuplot?), but it is extremely limited in its feature set. My biggest gripe with gnuplot, however, is that it forced me to separate my data collection/analysis from the actual plotting of the data. I personally am a huge fan of matplotlib — it is an uber-plotting library written in Python. It can produce high-quality graphics in dozens of formats (including interactive plotting), it has an object-oriented API as well as a imperative API along the lines of Matlab (hence the name). You can create amazingly rich plots and best of all, you can combine your data collection and analysis (which I was doing in Python anyways) with your plotting.

If you are more a Ruby person, check out gruff.

Bibliography Management

There are two aspects of bibliography management. First is the context of a specific paper: you are working on a paper and you want to collect all the relevant bibliographic information for citing in the paper. BibTex is the tool that is most commonly used for this, in combination with LaTeX. However, BibTex is buggy, the syntax is inconsistent across implementations, it lacks simple features like variables and the ability to “import” other bibtex files etc. Enter CrossTeX — a drop-in replacement for BibTex. CrossTeX is written in Python. It has an object-oriented model for representing citations. So once you define an object for author “Foo Bar” aliased as foobar, you can simply use foobar wherever you would like to cite “Foo Bar”.  CrossTeX also makes it trivial to define new formatting styles for your citations. For instance, if you want to change the capitalization of the titles or abbreviate “Proceedings” to “Proc.” everywhere. Finally, CrossTeX was built by some nice folks at Cornell, so they know exactly what the pain points of BibTeX were.

The second aspect of bibliography management is simply keeping a track of all the papers you read and review. These will come in handy when you are writing a paper, a dissertation, preparing for a talk or an interview, or simply trying to recall prior work in a given field. I highly recommend using CiteULike — it is an online bibliography management portal. Some features I really like: CiteULike has a really nice bookmarklet that you adding new items to your bibliography using a single click from various sites such as ACM, USENIX, IEEE, PubMed, arXiv and so on; it has some really nice social features as well such as tagging, groups, watch lists etc.; you can download selected citations in multiple formats; you can search easily by keyword, tag, author, area, year etc.

A Text Editor

I don’t mean an IDE (like Eclipse) or a Word processor (like MS Word). I mean a text editor and only a text editor. AFAIC, that means Vim or Emacs (if that works for you). The bottom line is, learn a text editor and become really really good at it. You will be amazed at how much time will save you and how much can it impact your productivity. Some features that are essential: syntax highlighting, regular expression support, spell check, support for snippets etc.

On that note, learn to write in LaTeX. I’m horrified by the fact that so many people are still using Word like tools to write papers. I don’t have anything against Word, but it is the wrong tool for writing papers. Just reference management, formatting, including figures etc are so incredibly easier in LaTeX.

Version Control

I can’t stress this more — you must get in the habit of versioning everything. Not just code, but your notes, write-ups and obviously papers. Having some version control has saved me from disasters many a times. And if you are collaborating on papers, I can’t imagine how people do it without some kind of version control system. Now there are a lot of choices out there. But if you are really savvy, you must use git :) Basically use any reasonable distributed VCS (Mercurial and Bazaar are also ok), but avoid Subversion and absolutely refuse to use CVS at all costs. CVS has lived a good life, but its time is now past and we must let it go.

Information Management

And by that, I mean staying on top of the news and research in your research area and/or academic community. I’ve found it very useful to add all the relevant blogs to a ‘research’ tag in my Google Reader (yes, the blogging bug has bit academia). Likewise, you can find a lot of current information on Twitter. I’m sure people have already started live-blogging and twittering from academic conferences as well!

Of course, for more conventional searches, DBLP and Google Scholar are invaluable. CiteSeer used to be the go-to website a few years ago, but I personally find Google Scholar much nicer to use and with just as much information, if not more.

Related posts:

1. Tools I use: matplotlib
2. Tools I use: beamer
3. More Vim tools

Over the past few years, Google has open sourced several projects that provide some commonly used building blocks in any large software project. Some of them I was aware of since when they were launched (like protobufs), while others I discovered only recently. I couldn’t find any location where all the projects were listed together and combing through Google Code looking for them was painful, so I’m putting together a list myself. Hope some of you find it useful.

• protobufs: Platform agnostic messages. Critical for any distributed system. Note that protobufs only provide message serialization/deserialization (for various languages). An important missing piece is an RPC framework built on top of them. There are several projects attempting to build one using protobufs, but none of them are robust or mature enough for production use.
• style guide: The importance of a style guide is probably understated. It is not about what is the “right” style — it is about consistency. While people may have different opinions, if everyone follows the same style, the code becomes much more readable and maintainable. Google maintains style guides for C++ and Python.
• config flags: Another important building block for all command line programs.
• logging: Self-evident. Google’s logging library supports various log levels and other useful macros.
• core dumper: A very nifty library — it allows you to dump core from within a running application. Extremely useful for debugging production systems.
• perftools: An extremely useful library for measuring and monitoring performance of programs. By simply linking against perftools, your application gets a much better malloc, heap checking, visual CPU profile of various routines (via graphviz), visualization of memory usage etc.
• googlemock: A framework to quickly build mock objects — useful for testing.
• googletest: Google’s C++ unit testing framework, built on top of xUnit. Integrates well with googlemock.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. There are numerous other open source projects from Google, some of them probably much more bigger and visible than the ones listed above — such as Wave, Go, GWT etc. If there’s a project that is a software building block that I missed out, do chime in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Experiences with Google App Engine
2. Google (Contacts, Mail, Talk) confusion
3. Interesting Google links

Here’s a sample of her works:

Siren

Smokestacks

She also has a series of daily drawings up on her blog.

Related posts:

1. The Bay Bridge Project
2. uBoggle is a featured application!
3. Vim and the future of editors

Update: Since this topic deserves a little more than a post, I have moved this post to a separate article which I shall keep expanding over time.

Related posts:

1. The Ancient Wars
2. The Universe and everything

First, some background. Lets just say that I lost my editor virginity to Vim. It was a brief, but violent introduction — the modal editing was too unfamiliar, the learning curve too steep. After dabbling with a few other conventional editors (such as KWrite), I settled upon Emacs (XEmacs actually, but thats another story).

For the next three years, I tweaked my .emacs file, fiddled around with settings and plugins and modes, played games and browsed the web, checked my email and newsgroups, all within the comfortable confines of Emacs. But I was getting wary of the long startup times and (at that time) the inability to use the same interface and features in console mode (such as over SSH) as in GUI mode. It was time to move on.

I rediscovered Vim around 6 years ago. I started with a clean slate. As the saying goes, Emacs is an operating system that also happens to have an editor in it. The relatively more focused feature set of Vim was refreshing in comparison. I loved that I could work in GUI mode, save my session, go back home and resume my session in a terminal over SSH, which the exact same interface and keybindings. I quickly became very productive with Vim, and over the years have honed my plugins, settings and color themes to just how I like them.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about this again, and I might just reconsider Vim. I highly recommend reading these two blog posts to better understand where I’m coming from:

• From Vim to Emacs — Part I
• From Vim to Emacs — Part II

Don’t get me wrong — I think Vim still has a lot to offer. But, I can not deny that Vim is not what I would call a “forward looking editor.” Here’s why:

• Development community: the Emacs development community is a lot more open and vibrant right now than the Vim community. Part of this has to do with the BDFL model in Vim. Bram Moolenar has done a tremendous job in bringing Vim to the stage where it is. People can and have forked Vim in the past. But for one reason or another, Vim has stayed Vim, and its development trajectory has been slow and incremental.
• Source code: Vim’s source code is not clean. At all. I just briefly skimmed over the source tree for Emacs 23, and it looks a lot more understandable and well structured.
• Architecture: Vim 7 finally got spell check. But the spell check does not use any of the existing tools or formats. Vim has its own scripting language, with its own interpreter, grammer and data structures. Why not just use one of the many wonderful programming languages out there? Yes, there are interfaces to allow writing Vim code in Python, Ruby, Perl etc. But why reinvent the wheel all over again?

When Bram Moolenaar — the lead developer of Vim –  joined Google, I had hoped that Vim would generate a lot more interest and enthusiasm. But so far, it hasn’t changed much.

And so, in the next few weeks, I’m going to take another look at Vim as well as Emacs. I’ll try to do an objective evaluation of where the editors stand today, where I perceive they are headed. I hope to make my decision on whether to move away from Vim or not by the end of this year.

Related posts:

1. The Ancient Wars
2. Vim and the future of editors
3. WP-Dokuwiki development update

Over the past few years, the domestic airlines industry in the US has seen a steady decline. Faced with the recession, they have been devising ever new ways of squeezing money out of unsuspecting customers. There are a few exceptions (such as Southwest), but by far, flying is usually not a very pleasant experience for me.

Little did I know that European “budget” airlines are, in fact, even worse than their American counterparts. I recently had the misfortune of traveling on one such airline — easyJet. There was nothing easy about the experience, and if it is up to me, I will never ever travel on easyJet again.

First, let me provide some context. We were planning to do a break journey in Europe on our way to India. In the past, we have always carried two checked bags and one hand bag per person for India trips, for obvious reasons (such a long journey, may be once in a year — you just end up carrying a lot of stuff. Even more importantly, you end up bringing back a lot of things!). Unfortunately, just a few days before we were scheduled to fly, American Airlines decided to start charging a $50 fee for the second checked bag on flights to Europe/India. This actually was not that big of a problem, since we had one flight on easyJet and they already had similar restrictions in place.

Actually, I find easyJet’s baggage policy extremely strange. Here are some salient features (emphasis mine):

• Every item of standard checked (‘hold’) baggage will incur a fee.
• Payment of the fee provides you with an aggregate allowance of 20kg across all pieces of hold baggage which may only be increased by payment of excess weight charges.
• Where checked-in hold baggage exceeds 20kgs in weight (subject to the above rule), each passenger will pay an excess baggage charge per kg.

Finally the fateful day arrived for our easyJet flight. At the check in counter, the gate agent weighed our “hold” bags (1 per person). Since we had been deliberately careful about packing, they were both less than 20kg each so did not pose a problem.

Next came the hand luggage. Now, in prior communication with easyJet, I had been told that easyJet did not impose any weight restrictions on the hand bags, as long as they fit in the overhead bins. To quote the website (emphasis mine):

Save where the limits set locally are more restrictive, passengers are permitted one standard piece of hand baggage to a volume limit of 55×40x20cm (including wheels and pockets) (“Standard Hand Baggage”). It must fit without force into the gauges provided at check-in or departure gates. No weight restriction applies within reasonable limits — i.e. a passenger must be able to place the piece of luggage safely in the overhead storage bins without assistance.

I have traveled extensively with the hand bags that we had and never ever had any problems with any airlines. I’m convinced that our gate agent was determined to give us grief, by the rude manner in which she dealt with us, her hostile attitude and body language. In any case, she asked us to show that our hand bags “fit without force” into the bin. Unfortunately our hand bags were shaped more like bags and less like suitcases (which is what the bin was designed for), so they did not fit comfortably, but they did fit.

I tried to explain the agent that we never had problems with the bags before, that they were empty on the top so looked bigger than they actually were. Furthermore, we were in transit to an international destination, and had no issues in the first leg of our flight (on American Airlines). But the gate agent was simply not ready to listen — it was almost as if she had made up her mind to spoil our morning.

Arguing with her was frustrating since it was not really a dialogue. I might as well have been talking to a wall. She would not listen to reason, or show any compassion. Worried that we might miss our flight, in a moment of panic, I decided to just pay whatever fee was required, and get on with it. Big mistake. As it turns out, easyJet not only charges for the number of checked bags, but after 20kg, there is a per-kg excess baggage charge, which needless to add, is exhorbitant. Long story short, we ended up paying a ridiculous fee for our hand luggage.

To add insult to injury, while waiting in the gate area for boarding to begin, I counted at least two dozen passengers whose hand bags were at least as big as ours, if not bigger. There were bags in all shapes and sizes, and several which could not have fit into the bins no matter what. I spoke again to the ground staff and they deferred saying that we had to discuss it with the airlines. It turns out discussing anything with easyJet is not easy either — they don’t have offices at most airports they serve, finding a phone number on their website was a challenge, the online customer support was basically just boiler plate responses.

It was an extremely frustrating and disappointing experience. I was extremely angry at that time and had thought I’d take this up with easyJet as soon as I got back. But just thinking of the time and energy it would take just to get to speak to some human at easyJet who would actually try to listen and understand our situation is disheartening. At least, I’ve learnt my lesson.

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3. Sex and the city

If you are interested in Big Data, you should check out the Big Data Summit.

What is it about?

The informal evening event, colocated with Hadoop World: NYC, will highlight advancements in
data warehousing and big data management. Similar to ScaleCamp, Big Data Summit will showcase
some of the most innovative uses of MPP data warehousing and other complementary solutions like
Hadoop to harness the power of Big Data.

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1. Aster @ MySpace
2. Lousy reporting at TechCrunch
3. Aster is hiring!

The Transbay blog has a great post on the closure. Of course, baybridgeinfo.org is the go-to site for the all things Bay Bridge related, including live construction cams, videos and a lot lot more.

Here is some trivia about the Bay Bridge:

• It is the first construction project to be showed in Google Earth.
• The tunnel through Yerba Buena Island is the largest bore tunnel in the world: 76-feet wide x 58-feet high.
• Depth of deepest pier on existing East Span—the deepest pier of its time!: 242 feet—70 feet water and 170 feet mud.
• Amount of wire: 18,500 tons
• Amount of paint: 200,000 gallons
• Daily average number of vehicles that use the Bay Bridge: 280,000

Bay Bridge in Google Earth

Related posts:

1. Google Code – Project Hosting
2. Google Earth – System Requirements
3. Earth Hour

Click here to view the embedded video.

Credits:

• Traffic data courtesy sigalert.com
• Web pages captured using the standalone version of browsershots’ shotfactory
• Image processing (cropping, annotation) using ImageMagick
• Images combined into a video using ffmpeg
• Sound arranged by Surabhi

The video above is not the most interesting. But now that I have all the code in place, I’m looking forward to capturing the traffic during some more interesting events, and covering some more area.

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1. The Celeste Prize
2. saturday == funday. sunday == ?
3. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Virtualization, broadly speaking, is a recognition of the adage that any problem in computer science can be solved through the introduction of an additional layer of indirection.  The technique is applied to modern systems at many interfaces, from hardware (Xen, VMware), to OS system calls (VServers, Jails), to high-level language run times (Java, Python).  While these approaches differ dramatically in implementation, they provide similar benefits and often must tackle related challenges.

The 2010 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments brings together researchers across the many applications of virtualization in today’s systems.  We invite original papers on topics relating to virtualization — especially those that will have broad appeal across these approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Design and implementation of the virtualization layer,
• The use of virtualization to provide novel functionality, such as high availability, enhanced security and dependability,
• Challenges in applying virtualization in new environments, such as unusual architectures, real-time constraints, and very large scales,
• Novel virtualization techniques to support cloud computing,
• Development and debugging for virtual environments, such as record/replay debugging and omniscience,
• I/O concerns specific to virtualization,
• Experience reports from deployments of virtualized environments,

In short, the conference is broadly interested in lessons from virtualization that will apply to a wide range of researchers as well as the novel use of virtualization techniques to solve practical problems.

Here are the important dates:

Submission   : November 9, 2009
Notification : February 5, 2010
Camera Ready : March 4, 2010

Detailed submission guidelines and instructions are available on the conference website (http://vee2010.cs.princeton.edu/).

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1. Above the clouds
2. How to attend a conference?
3. NSDI

When Gmail first introduced the ability to import Contacts, I prompty exported my addressbook from KAddressbook. And then I mostly forgot about it, until recently. In the meantime, Google happily kept adding “suggested” contacts to my addressbook.

I decided to revisit my Google Contacts after reading some blog posts about new functionality. Sure enough, Contacts now even has its own URL (google.com/contacts). I figured this was a good time to clean out the contact and start from scratch with a clean list not polluted by the automatic suggested contacts. So I went ahead and deleted all the contacts and re-imported them from my desktop address book.

Surprisingly, there are weird interactions between my Google Contacts, and my Google Talk buddy list. A lot of people on my buddy list silently disappeared, without any kind of message or confirmation from either GMail, Talk or Contacts. And since then, my attempts to add back all the deleted buddies has failed miserably. Every time I add someone to my list, they show up just fine, but if I log out and log back in, they are usually not there.

What is even worse, this behavior is non-determinstic. Some additions persist across multiple sessions, while others are more ephemeral. I still don’t know exactly what the interaction between these three properties is, but it is very confusing. Google should clarify this more — what exactly is the impact of modifying my Contacts on things like Google Talk etc?

Related posts:

1. Google Talk
2. Why isn’t Google killing Ringo and Plaxo?
3. More on Google Talk

Over the past few weeks, one particular commercial caught my attention: the one for Angie’s List. The ad proclaims Angies List to be the go-to destination for customer reviews on movers, painters, lawyers, doctors and more. What a great idea, I thought. So one day as soon as I got home, I decided to check them out.

The first thing that hit me was that it is a paid site. I would need to sign up as a member and pay subscription fee. Bummer! Don’t get me wrong, I think websites reserve the right to charge for whatever services they want. But in this case, I did not really see the value that Angies List itself was adding.

According to them, here are the top 3 reasons why I would use Angies List (as seen in the quick tour):

1. Service providers don’t (or can not) pay to appear on the list
2. They receive over 5000 reports each month
3. They have information on over 250 types of services

Hmm, lets see. AFAIK, service providers don’t (or can not) pay to appear on either Yelp or Craigs list. I’m pretty sure Yelp receives way more than 5000 reviews each month. And both Yelp and Craigslist have more than enough categories as far as I am concerned.

At the end of the day, the value of the site like Angie’s List, depends on the quality of the reviews. Since the content is user generated anyways, I don’t see how Angie’s List can claim a higher quality than Yelp reviews. Just becase I paid a hefty fee does not incentivize me to actually write a detailed and thoughtful review. In fact, since I paid, I just want to get access to lots of high quality reviews, not worry about writing them.

I have seen “Yelp loves us” badges on several restaurants. I have yet to see an Angie’s List badge anywhere. On Yelp, because it is open to anyone, people are recognized for their reviews. What is the reputation model in Angie’s List?

I digged some more on their website and found these nuggets (non-italicized text is mine):

Angie’s List is better than free review sites:

• No anonymous reviews. Really? In some sense, Yelp reviews are not anonymous either. On the other hand, if you are going to force me to reveal my real name etc on the site, I would consider it a loss of privacy. Besides, what does this buy us?
• Certified data collection process prevents companies from reporting on themselves or their competitors. Any details on what this process is? A closed system is not necessarily a good system. There have been many cases where customer issues were resolved or a problem was addressed due to the public nature of Yelp.
• Our Complaint Resolution Team will intercede if a project goes bad.
• Companies respond to reports, so you get the whole story. Which companies? Is there a partner program for providers? I thought you couldn’t pay to be on the list?

And there’s more:

What you get:

• 24-hour access to reviews on AngiesList.com. Wow, the Internets have arrived. Are you listening Yelp?
• Live support through our call center. Ok, this one might actually be a useful value-add.
• Award-winning Angie’s List magazine. What does the magazine add beyond the website? I don’t want to be party to more paper wastage. I already get enough catalogs as it is.
• Access to our Complaint Resolution Team.
• Discounts from highly rated service companies. What is the business model here? Why/how would companies know they are highly rated, unless they sign up as well? Why would they offer discounts?

Overall, I just don’t see why anyone would use their service. If you have used Angie’s List, I’d love to hear your opinions on how it compares to Yelp or even Craigs list.

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This post was triggered by the fact that my advisor, Prof. Amin Vahdat, is also blogging now! Let me take this opportunity to highlight some academic blogs that I know of.

• Idle Process by Amin Vahdat, UCSD
• Shtetl-Optimized by Scott Aarsonson, MIT
• CS Diary by Peter Lee, CMU
• DBMS Musings by Daniel Abadi, Yale

Please share any other interesting blogs from the academia you may know of in the comments!

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An international prize for contemporary arts and a network for art professionals.

There are some really amazing videos in there. If you are interested in video art at all, I highly recommend checking out some of the entries. And of course, if you like Surabhi’s work, please vote for it! Here’s PEEL:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The irony that I’m talking about is this. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate education, I was mostly a “systems and networking” person. Obviously I took classes in several other areas as well, and I think I learnt or retained something from most of these classes, with one exception. I took a database course in IIT, and then once again at UCSD, and both times I failed miserably to appreciate the subject.

At this point it would be easy to blame the faculty for not doing a good job, but I’m confident that the fault was no less my own. I remember sleeping through a lot of my database classes :(

Anyways, the point is that here I was, with a systems PhD, with zero background in databases and having pretty much zero appreciation for databases as an area, and where do I end up working at? A company that builds distributed database systems. I think its funny in a way. But the great thing is that I’m learning so much about databases now and appreciating the kind of engineering insight and effort that goes into building a performant, robust distributed database system.

Related posts:

1. History of Computing
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