Many people are working on making the network smarter in many ways, especially when it comes to being totally oblivious to the kind of traffic that flows through it. But making the network intelligent is a dual edge sword – on one end improving differentiation for VoIP traffic can make the network better, but then on the other hand, you have companies like Comcast using the same concept to degrade P2P traffic. Yes the net should be neutral but who will decide?

While I love the idea of dumb networks and smart edges, I think the advances in technology will bring about change – whether we use it for good of bad, like any other science, is up to us and the laws we make.

Here is the video, if you like to watch it:

However, as we move towards applications that may have 1000s of users if not millions we have to look at scalability seriously.

Here are some links that I found useful -

• Scaling in .Net Applications – Scaling out and Scaling up patterns
• Multi-server setup for ASP.NET applications
• How To Scale – Ruby on Rails – Nice presentation, touching on various approaches that can be applied on other platforms too.

Here is the slide show of the Ruby On rails presentation:

Let me know if you find useful resources that address this issue.

Can we add context to search? What we are looking for cannot always be translated into keywords and the same keywords have different meaning. Hard problem.

Syed Yasin, my relative, who works in R&D at Sobha Renaissance has been working on this interesting problem. Some time back they had a press release where they announced LMai. Below is the Video.

Apart from the limitations of what the Browser can and cannot do – some of the other major challenges are:

• Connectivity – For the apps to work, you always need a connection. Further the quality of the quality of the connection dictates what can and cannot be done.
• Process intensive tasks – Like image processing, data analysis, etc take too long and can make the pages time out and further server scalability a challenge.

Given that Google is so vested in online apps and they have the resources to actually address these problems – They exactly did exactly that with Google Gear. This provides a elegant way to work with web pages offline, thus enabling the web applications to work with limited or no connectivity and at the same time do some processing off line.

It is really exciting as it offers a way to solve may problems that I had in the past.

For example – In an application, I had a mobile user that had limited or no connectivity with a laptop collecting data onsite (survey) that was huge (hi-res pictures and video). To upload it we had a “web version” and a “desktop version”. The desktop version was used on-site and would sync with the server, once the mobile user got back to the “home station”. The home-station was the same laptop with a wired high-speed connection.

The problem with this solution? We had to maintain two separate application. Further we were limited to certain platforms for the desktop application which limited our choice on the server (as we wanted the same developer skill sets).

But that can change with Google Gear and I think they have really addressed very real issue with Webware. How does it solve your problem?

Underneath it is a Vista OS with a infra-red multi-sensor that allow the system to recognize more than one touch points. It is too expensive to buy for the home yet, but that will surely change in a few years.

While it has very interesting applications, it would be interesting to see how it can change our interaction with the PC?

One of the most difficult things is not to learn new things, but to unlearn what we already know.

My take on the connected world is ubiquitous computing – everything is connected and computing devices are a natural extension of your everyday life. When you use something so naturally, that you do not give it a second thought – that is UI perfection. There was an interesting project called “Aura” from Carnegie Mellon that I came across a few years ago. Not sure what the status of the project is now, but you can find out more at:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aura/

HCI and wireless networking (my area of research) and a lot more will go into realizing the “true” digital world seamless.

Dream On!

While there were may interesting aspects he covered under the GINA (Generalized Internetworking Network Architecture) like

• Seperation of ID and address
• Virtual seperation of control and data
• Packet and Circuit swithing at differnt levels of abstraction for QoS. Best of both worlds – circuit and packet switching.
• Many more, you can see the full talk here.

The most interesting thing was the architecture itself. For most of the issue today we have work around – be it firewalls (port blocking!), shortage of IP (NAT), etc. As he pointed out the foundation should be strong and broad so that implementers and user can then pick and choose what they want to implement or use. The more limited the scope the more we force the network onto the final user. Ideally the network have fundamental concepts that allow users to develop or use any kind of service that they want.. hard problem but solvable. All we need to do is distill the core concepts as building blocks that can then be used any way the user deems fit.

But it made me wonder and speculate. Java was developed by some very smart people, so what led to the distilled marketing message. While we can merely speculate about the future, one thing is for sure – bandwidth will become cheaper and web based services will address many trivial day to day need. Like these day I use my browser is the most used application on my computer – for email, banking, news and information and research. While I do some development on my computer but I can work with a Vim console on a server. And I find a computer with out an internet connection almost useless. Maybe offline word processing? But then Google just bought Writely – online word processing. No software to install and all your data is backed up (security concerns anyone?) and Microsoft is pushing for “Live” – web based software services. Many cool and useful apps and this is just the beginning.

So what makes the network the computer? A lot of things have to come together, for starters the network itself. Then the protocols and we are in a state of flux at the application and software levels. Today we can develop distributed app (e.g. mash up, SOA, or orchestrated web services) which were just “in theory” just a few years ago. So maybe we all saw it coming but they were closer to realizing it.

Then came design patterns by the gang of four. It is not a easy read and will not make sense till you can see the pattern. I have it for years and go back to it to see how the threads weave into pattern. Today I came across Yahoo! Design Pattern and UI pattern libraries for web development. Earlier today I watched Atlas being presented by Nikhilk Kothari at Microsoft. It seems there are finally libraries, patterns, and code bases that will temp even lazy programmers like me to use some rigor and discipline in to the development process.

ASP.NET 2.0 also offers such great patterns like the Providers. Are we coming of age? For some it is buzz words like Web 2.0 and SOA but the rest it is a exciting new world and one that is better.