My recent flute recording - Unna Vida from Virumandi

My recent flute creation. Click on Play button below to play



For a complete list of all recordings Click Here

Singapore SFO Tour Videos

Click the play button to play each one of them.

Nivio - Roaming Windows Logon Profile across the internet

Have you heard of the WebOS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_operating_system

Typical drawbacks of such a system is the interoperability with Windows system. Most cannot run anything beyond whatever AJAXified applications that the WebOS author had written. In other words, anything complex beyond Mail, file Management and Photo Management, IM, Word Processor, Excel and PowerPoint is virtually impossible to be run.

Nivio draws a solution taking this into consideration. Nivio runs as a RDC application. What I assume they have written is to use the RDC library available in Windows and wrap it up as a ActiveX application in Windows IE combo. For Firefox and other Browsers + other OS combo, what they have used is to write a (supposedly)thin Applet to run RDC.
(Well, when in this world an applet was called Thin Client, for its bulky memory footprint? :p)

I assume that they have a Load Balancing System that can handle RDC requests from various clients and ensure some QoS on the requests. In my person experience, I have seen that RDC works well when the bandwidth is atleast 256Kbps+ (well it has worked in 64kbps as well, but running something complex that would change the screen often is ruled out).

The biggest question in this whole system is the scalability. How many users can their system scale. It is known fact that a system in RDC can reasonably handle double digit figures to few hundreds of connections. With a server farm of Windows Servers and roaming profile across them, i think they can sustain a decent lot.

There is also another way that they might have implemented. Throw a VMWare server farm, and put a load balancing RDC Connection acceptor that forwards connection to the VMWare Server Pool..

The 2nd one seems much more scalable as VMWare is much more proven than Windows 2003 Windows Terminal Server systems, but in any case, Nivio will have to shell out cash for each client connection (either now or at a later time).

Another question at hand is, when you play , say youtube video, how good will be the change in your screen? Answer currently is pathetic in RDC. It will be tough to see much change. The Nivio guys will ahve to sweat it out in this part, and significant space for innovative solution exists in this area.

There is another known issue with RDC. Sometimes when you see error messages, they are shown in the actual monitor, but donot appear in RDC Client. I have seen this issue when using RDC myself, although I cannot tell with confidence if this bug still persists in RDC, but I hope this issue might have been solved by Microsoft.

Well, thats it for the day. Ciao.

My recent flute creation

Human Computation

There are several cases where humans excel computers at computation. This is harnessed in Luis von Ahn's work on Human computation.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

If you want to see a demo, you can see here: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

I now see that some other implementation of the same thing, which is much more interesting and pragmatic:
http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/05/recaptcha-new-way-to-fight-spam.html

Interesting indeed.

Save Trees - Creative Advertisement

A very creative advertisement that I saw at MG Road, Bangalore.
It tells that "No one ever attained enlightenment under a lamp post, Please plant trees. -WWF".

Letter Writing

From,
xxxxx,
xxxxx,
place - zipcode.

To,
The Inspector,
Some Police Station,
Place - ZipCode.

Respected Sir/Madam,
Sub: Request to find lost bicycle - lost on 3rd May 2007.

I bought a new bicycle from (The proof of the same is attached to the letter). I lost it on 3rd May 2007, morning. On 2nd May 2007, I locked my bicycle at the basement. It was last sighted by Mr.XXX at around 11 PM on 2nd May. On 3rd May morning, when I came to the basement to start my cycle, it was not there. The watchman has no clue of anyone having come to the building after 11 PM, nor he says he heard any sound of someone opening the gates. The details of my bicycle are below:

1. Detail 1
2. Detail 2
3. Detail 3

I kindly request you to find my bicycle. I m having a tough time commuting without it. I would be very grateful to you for the same.

Thanking you.
Yours Truly,
Varun.

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How was the letter writing exercise?
Sadly my "lost bicycle " letter writing skills seems to have some use now. :(