Traffic spike

I don’t know if it was “vim” or it was “sexy”, but somehow this post landed up on Reddit. This is the closest I’ve come to being slashdotted — for that one day, Reddit drove nearly 95% of the traffic to my site. Also, before you start jumping to conclusions from the graph above, let me put some numbers out there. On average, my site gets anywhere between 200 to 400 visitors daily. On April 18th, my site got 7000+ visitors, an order of magnitude more than I normally get. That is the spike you see, and now the traffic is back to normal, thank you very much.

Since a lot of people seem to be interested in Vim hopefully, I want to discuss the space of text editors (in particular, editors for programming) and where I think we are headed.

The first observation is that both of the giants on the editing world — Vim and Emacs — are ancient by any standards. Depending o how you look at it, I think it is fair to say that neither editor has evolved significantly in terms of the underlying code, architecture and usage model in the past two decades, if not more.

The second observation is that despite the large number of editors out there, IMHO few have any significant mind and market share other than Vim and Emacs. Obviously there is Eclipse, Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.

And so I wonder, what would the text editor landscape look 5-10 years down the line? There are many who would say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I’m a big believer in change, and I think over time, change is inevitable. However, at this point I don’t know what, if any, substantial change is happening in the text-editor arena. No new editors with fundamentally new ways of manipulating text or amazingly compelling features are emerging. I actually don’t mind reinventions of the wheel either, as long as the reinvention delivers a much better wheel. For instance, the Vim source code is not the most modular, extensible or maintainable. And it is in C — not that there is anything wrong with it, but I think an object oriented language is better for a complex piece of software like Vim.

The only recent buzz has been about Textmate and the many clones it has since inspired. I’m really looking forward to Yzis reach a usable milestone. What are other promising editors out there that you are excited about?

• The Ancient Wars
• Vim is still sexy!
• The Quixtar Post
• Vim 7
• Interesting Analytics

I use vim as my editor of choice. As I note above, to each his own editor.

However, Vim is not what one would call a “sexy editor”. After all, it has been around (in some shape or form) since before I was born. It does not generate as much buzz in the blogosphere and is not the darling of all the new kids on the block, as some of the other editors out there. Not many Ruby on Rails developers, for instance, seem to be using Vim for coding (actually, saying that a lot of RoR developers seem to be using Textmate is probably more accurate, but you get the point). It is written in C and does not use git for hosting. The Vim website leaves much to be desired. In the social networking world, Vim barely has a presence.

But, I contend that Vim still has a lot to offer. Here are few of the things you can check out to spruce up your Vim usage:

• xoria256: a modern, functional and eye-pleasing color scheme.
• snipMate: Textmate like snippets for Vim. Interestingly, snipmate lives on github. There are actually several textmate like plugins for Vim, I prefer snipMate. I have succesfully used snippetsEmu in the past.
• Omni completion: Probably not as awesome as Visual Studio’s, but useful nonetheless.
• Check out my list of some essential vim plugins.
• A byte of Vim: from the author of the well known “A byte of Python” book.

I’m also very happy to see the number of Vim related repositories on github. Bottomline: don’t give up on Vim. Vim is still sexy baby, you just need to look in the right places :)

Update: I’m including a screenshot of Xoria below.

• Vim 7
• Vim and the future of editors
• New look
• checkoutvim.png (PNG Image, 1440×900 pixels)
• Fresh look

I beg to differ.

Allow me to bring to your attention the series of innovations Gillette has “pioneered” in the past three decades or so (courtesy Wikipedia):

• Double-blade razor: 1971
• Triple-blade razor: 1998
• Battery powered razors: 2004
• Razor with five blades: 2007
• Razor with rear trim blade (for a total of six blades!): 2007

Notice a trend? Going from two to three blades took nearly three decades. Going from three to five blades only took three years. Thats an exponential growth! If the trend continues, I predict that we will see a new razor from Gillette later this year that will have 6 blades or more.

No seriously, think about this for a second: the only real innovation shaving products have seen in the past 50 years is increasing the number of blades. And somehow we should believe that this is the best we can get? And this company is actually making money?

I’ve been using Gillette for more than a decade now and I can tell you that my shaving experience has not gotten one bit better. For a long time, I used the two blade Sensor Excel and I was very happy with it. Until Gillette executed what is known as planned obsolescence. I could not find blades for my razors anywhere. I was hence forced to “upgrade”, and I went with the latest Gillette Fusion. Even with 5+1 blades and the satisfaction of a tiny AAA battery buzzing the razor, shaving has not gotten any better.

I did use a Shick Quattro one time and I actually think their blades are a lot better and long lasting. As soon as I have used up all of my Fusion blades, I am going to give the Quattro another try. This is an industry that could use some serious innovation.

• Come on Yahoo! dikha de!!
• Google galore
• Euphoria
• euphoria
• Vim and the future of editors

Having all my financial data pulled in a single place is fantastic. Previously, I used to have to go and log into 5 different websites to check on all my bank accounts and credit cards. Add to that the ability to examine spending trends, watch your investment grow (or crash, as is the case with the current economy) over time, alerts for fee, low balance and over-budgets etc, and you’ve got a killer service in your hands. Of course, Mint is not without its problems, but the benefits far outweigh the snags.

Passpack has been a real time saver for me. I have written about web based password managers before, and so far Passpack has been just fantastic! I just wish they would bring back search-as-you-type…

I’m a big believer in using the right tools you help you work smarter. RTM is a great way to offload your todo list from your brain. It has all the key elements of a good web service good — a great UI, keyboard shortcuts, the ability to email tasks, integration with services like IMified, a nice API (so you can use desktop apps such as Gnome DO or Quicksilver to interact with RTM without ever leaving your desktop).

• Academics and Web 2.0
• Lame post
• Test driving KDE 4.0
• Source code search engines
• Blogging Challenge: Top 10 Keywords for Your Blog

Stanford is undoubtedly one of the top most engineering schools in the world. In my mind, a computer science curriculum at such top schools should do just that — teach computer science. Courses that cover computer architecture, software design, operating systems, networking, graphics, theory, databases, algorithms etc all make sense to me. But a course to teach students how to use the API on a commercial SDK? I think other organizations (vocational institutes, community colleges etc) are better suited for such courses. What is so great about such courses being taught at Stanford or MIT or Berkeley? I personally think those resources could be used better elsewhere.

It seems this is part of a larger trend. More and more schools are designing courses that are aligned with the hot buzz-words in the industry, perhaps in order to attract applications. For instance, you can learn how to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails (RoR) at Berkeley. Stanford has another class on building Facebook applications.

I would much rather see a class on say “building scalable web services” and have Facebook, Twitter as case studies in the class.

• New tag: research
• History of Computing — 6
• Stanford website lame
• History of Computing — 3
• Browsers are the new cross platform GUI tookit

However, over time, the service has been gradually deteriorating. Since the past few weeks I have noticed a significant increase in latency. Meaning that if I open mail.google.com side-by-side with mail.google.com/a/floatingsun.net, my “regular” gmail account loads up much, much faster than my floatingsun.net account. This despite the fact that my regular gmail account has at least 100x the messages on my floatingsun.net account. And in fact, there have been several occassions in the recent past where it doesn’t load at all, or fails with a server error.

Not to mention that IMAP access has been horrendous recently. Throughout the day, email takes forever to open in my IMAP client (it opens up relatively faster on the web interface) and I get frequent disconnections from the server.

I don’t mean to beat up on Google. I must admit that I am on the free plan, so I really have no reason to complain. But gmail is also free. I have a feeling Google is deliberately imposing some kind of quality-of-service differentiation between paid Google Apps accounts vs free ones. I am keeping an eye on the status dashboard — it says no issues but my IMAP is still flaky. Is anyone else seeing poor performance on free GAFYD accounts?

• Using GMail to backup emails
• Faking from address
• GMail Chat
• Email wars
• Killer calendar

I’m delighted to announce that I’m a proud member of the Hulu Century Club. Yep, you heard it right — I was among the first 100 registered users on Hulu! Even I was unaware of this fact until a few days ago, when I received an email from Hulu:

Consider yourself one of the elite: You’re one of the first 100 registered users on Hulu.com. With our one-year anniversary coming on March 12th, we wanted to thank you for supporting us from the very beginning. We need just a few pieces of info in order to send you a little token of our appreciation.

So there you go, I knew before you!

• How gTalk pushed jabber
• Newsvine
• History of Computing — 6
• Better late than never
• More on Airtel Call Home

I’m therefore very happy to note that we are still hiring at Aster! We have a couple of positions open — you can find all the details on our website. So if you are looking for an exciting place to work at in these challenging times, drop us a note. Or if you know someone who is looking for a job, point them our way. Thanks!

• Swades
• Forrest Tuesday
• Forrest
• My first “book” is published!
• Funky

We were working on a paper, and my advisor asked me write a section giving an overview of our implementation. In particular, he wanted me to come up with some good visuals to depict what was going on. So I fired up Inkscape and drew a figure. My figure had a few big prominent markers. Now I’m not too creative when it comes to color schemes. In other words, when I think of “color”, I start from Red, Blue and Green (RGB). Not surprisingly then, I drew my markers in red and blue. Prominent and easily distinguishable.

Now, it so happened that my markers were circular in shape. This was primarily because circles are really easy to draw in Inkscape, and one of the first shapes you see on the toolbar, and also because I didn’t pay too much attention to the shape of the markers. Naturally then, in the corresponding text describing the figure, I had the phrases “red balls” and “blue balls” sprinked all over the place.

I happily sent out the first draft to the faculty on the paper. In our next meeting, everyone came in looking very funny and laughing over something and I had no idea what they were laughing about. I felt so left out, like there was some secret joke that I had missed out on. Well, it turns out that “blue balls” has an entirely different connotation that I had never heard of back in India. Now, imagine a formal academic paper on virtualization talking in terms of red and blue balls. No wonder everyone found it so funny.

Lesson of the story: choose your colors, and your shapes, very very carefully :)

• Friday the 13th
• Still around
• More on the new theme
• Post-its in books
• Money transfer in movies

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

The funky bar is courtesy the earth hour plugin. Of course, just having a CSS distraction on the website doesn’t do much if it is not followed up by real action. I will be turning off the lights in my apartment at the prescribed time and so should you. I’ll also try to rope in as many of my friends as I can. Remember, this is about making a choice. A single lamp in your house for an hour probably feels trivial, but with millions of people, it adds up. Besides, it is a gesture to show your solidarity and support and committment.

Are you going to take part?

• Shubh Deepawali
• End of year musings
• Mystery Spot
• Google Earth – System Requirements
• Summer sublet

A few weeks back I was thinking about the name “Aster” and I realized that I didn’t really know what it meant. So I did some quick Googling and landed up at good old Wikipedia. It turns out that Aster is a genus of flowers.

On some more reading, it was evident that one could draw parallels between some of the characteristics of this genus and the features of Aster’s products. Here are some quotes from the article on Asteraceae:

The most evident characteristic of Asteraceae is perhaps their inflorescence: a specialised capitulum, technically called a calathid or calathidium, but generally referred to as flower head or, alternatively, simply capitulum.^[7] The capitulum is a contracted raceme composed of numerous individual sessile flowers, called the florets, all sharing the same receptacle.

In particular, a “pseudanthium (Greek for “false flower”) or flower head is a special type of inflorescence, in which several flowers are grouped together to form a flower-like structure.”

In the same spirit, the Aster nCluster database is composed of many commodity components but exposes itself a single, unified database.

• Aster @ MySpace
• Mother’s Day
• Of mice and men
• Curry May Help Prevent Colon Cancer
• Aster is hiring!

While there is plenty of Linux-specific software out there as well, most of it is to fill the void left by mainstream vendors. Consider the Instant Messaging world. Google Talk still has no native client for Linux. In fact, there is no really good and well supported chat client on Linux that reliably does voice as well as video chat. Yes, there are ways to make it work, but if they really worked, wouldn’t more people be using them?

A brave soul is making another attempt to change the status-quo. Enter Synapse: a refreshingn take on a Jabber/XMPP only IM client, designed especially for Linux. (Interistingly, Synapse is written using Qt/Mono, both of which are cross-platform, so it could easily run on other platforms as well).

Quoting from the introductory blog post:

With all the focus on the web, a lot of people have been dismissing desktop operating systems as nothing more than something required to run a web browser. Unfortunately, Linux, which has suffered from unpolished UI applications for a while, has been hit especially hard by this trend.

Even though there have been lots of exciting advances to the platform (Mono, DBus, Cairo, Gstreamer, KDE4, etc.), few developers focus on supporting Linux, and Linux applications rarely receive the same polish and attention to detail as web applications.

Although it makes me unpopular, I’m not ready to give up on Linux software development. I feel strongly that there’s a place for both web and desktop applications, and exciting opportunities for integration between them.

I like many things about Synapse already:

• a slick website
• it uses git (and github)
• provides packages for Ubuntu and some other distros
• the app itself is visually interesting

Of course, many things don’t quite work yet (such as the ability to add multiple accounts!). But it definitely looks like a very interesting project, one that I’ll be watching very closely.

• The future of Google
• Linux and Closed Source Software
• Year of the Linux Desktop
• Webcams in Linux
• Enough with Linux as a second class citizen!

• WP Dokuwiki 0.3
• WP-Dokuwiki
• WP-Dokuwiki development update
• Structured Résumés: why does it have to be so hard?
• Code updates

First, some context. Here is the problem that Steve posed:

For example, suppose we are interested in the optimization of our website flow in order to retain and engage visitors driven to us by SEO/SEM. We want to answer the question: for SEO/SEM-driven traffic that stay on our site only for 5 or less pageviews and then leave our site and never return in the same session, what are the top referring search queries and what are the top path of navigated pages on our site? In traditional data warehouse solutions, this problem would require a five-way self-join of granular weblog data, which is simply unfeasible for large sites such as Myspace.

And here is the nPath query that answers the above problem (taken from Steve’s post):

SELECT entry_refquerystring, entry_page || “,” || onsite_pagepath as onsite_pagepath, count(*) as session_count

FROM nPath(
ON ( select * from clicks where year = 2009 )
PARTITION BY customerid, sessionid
ORDER BY timestamp
PATTERN ( ‘Entry.Onsite+.OffSite+$’ )
SYMBOLS (
domain ilike “mysite.com” and refdomain ~* “yahoo.com|google.com|msn.com|live.com” as Entry,
domain ilike “mysite.com” as OnSite,
domain not ilike “mysite.com” as OffSite
)
MODE( NONOVERLAPPING )
RESULT(
first(page of Entry) as entry_page,
first(refquerystring of Entry) as entry_refquerystring,
accumulate(page of Onsite) as onsite_pagepath,
count(* of Onsite) as onsitecount_minus1
)
)
WHERE onsitecount_minus1 < 4
GROUP BY 1,2
ORDER BY 3 DESC
LIMIT 1000;

Alright, so lets see whats going on here. It is important to always keep the big picture in mind — nPath scans groups of (sequential) rows at a time, searching for user specified patterns. Thus, the first thing that we need to specify is exactly what rows will nPath be operating on. This looks pretty much like a regular SQL query:

ON ( select * from clicks where year = 2009 )
PARTITION BY customerid, sessionid
ORDER BY timestamp

Next, we must specify what is it that we are looking for, or the search pattern. The search pattern is unimaginatively specified via the PATTERN clause:

PATTERN ( ‘Entry.Onsite+.OffSite+$’ )

The pattern description looks very much like any regular expression. The above pattern will find groups of rows where the first row matches “Entry”, followed by one or more “Onsite”s and ending with one or more “Offsite”(s). Next, we need to define what “Entry”, “Onsite” and “Offsite” mean. This is done via the SYMBOLS clause:

SYMBOLS (
domain ilike “mysite.com” and refdomain ~* “yahoo.com|google.com|msn.com|live.com” as Entry,
domain ilike “mysite.com” as OnSite,
domain not ilike “mysite.com” as OffSite
)

A row denotes an “Entry” if the corresponding page is on the domain mysite.com and the referer domain was one of the popular search engines. This makes sure we are not counting clicks from other links on mysite.com. “OnSite” and “OffSite” have similar descriptions.

Once we have identified the pattern and the symbols that make up the pattern, we can do some processing with them. Among other things, nPath allows you to dynamically control the columns of the output. These are specified via the RESULTS clause. Columns can be specified via existing column attributes, or using SQL/nPath aggregates:

RESULT(
first(page of Entry) as entry_page,
first(refquerystring of Entry) as entry_refquerystring,
accumulate(page of Onsite) as onsite_pagepath,
count(* of Onsite) as onsitecount_minus1
)

Finally, we can specify exactly what columns from the output we want to view, and how we want to view them. This is specified just like a regular SELECT clause, which operates on the output of an nPath query instead of regular SQL tables:

SELECT entry_refquerystring, entry_page || “,” || onsite_pagepath as onsite_pagepath, count(*) as session_count

And thats about it as far as the functionality of the query goes — there is of course some more syntactic sugar for specifying other constraints such as GROUP BY and ORDER BY. There is a LOT more to nPath than this, but hopefully it gives you some idea of the capabilities of this extremely powerful construct.

• Google Analytics — the deep web
• Whats up with PageRank?
• Interesting Facts About Domain Names
• Google Reader archiving less?
• Word count

Unfortunately, with KDE4, I am no longer running Compiz since kwin (KDE’s native window manager) has built-in support for compositing now. KDE4 is great (especially with 4.2) but I still missed the screenshot plugin very much. I couldn’t find any equivalent plugins for KDE4, so I was on the lookout for a workaround. It turns out, there is one. Here is what you do:

• Go into System Settings -> Input Actions
• Create a new global shortcut (right click)
• Bind a convenient shortcut — I use Super+S or Meta+S
• For the command/URL, enter ‘kbackgroundsnapshot –region’ without the quotes, of course

And there you go — now you can simply press Super+S anywhere, anytime and the mouse cursor will change to a cross-bar. Once you have selected the region to capture, hit enter to save the picture, escape to cancel the action. By default the pictures are saved to your Desktop folder, and are named ’snapshotX.png’ where X is some number. Here’s a screenshot that I just took:

What makes this work is the little-less known program (like so many other hidden gems in KDE) ‘kbackgroundsnapshot’. It is essentially ksnapshot, but it is supposed to run in the “background”, meaning that it doesn’t show the regular dialog box that ksnapshot shows. Useful for scripts and such.

• Konqueror hidden goodies
• Tools I use: qalculate
• input plugin weirdness
• WP-Dokuwiki development update
• Test driving KDE 4.0