TechTeeter

Take a look at the video below flaunting what is supposedly Wired’s iPad app. Well, actually, it’s a digital version of the magazine that Wired created with Adobe. But hey, we all know where this is going. The magazine app seems slick and the experience is out-of-the-world rich. It may make me walk down to the Apple store and get my third and most expensive Apple product.

My essential question to this is, why couldn’t Amazon do this with Kindle? They came out with a product that was just a (first) step in the ladder to where we want to be with digital media consumption. And their revisions to the Kindle have landed utterly short of the vision.

Google’s Nexus One* has a new incarnation that’s compatible with AT&T 3G network. This also means:

“… you can use it with a SIM card from most GSM operators worldwide.”

I’m still under contract with AT&T and won’t be replacing my iPhone any time soon. But, this phone is suddenly looking like a serious candidate for doing that, which I guess will happen in the next year or so.

In the meantime, I hope Google/HTC will fix the infamous touchscreen problem, enhance the battery life, and provide a cheaper contract option with AT&T.

*In related news, Google was denied the trademark rights to “Nexus One”. Wonder, what the new phone will be called. I vote for gooFone (goof one ).

I ran into an interesting, never-before-seen use of Google Buzz today. Josh Wills (a Google ex-employee) live-Buzzed the GMail panel at SXSW yesterday.

Now, what’s so special about that? We have seen live-blogging before. How different can live-Buzzing be? And Buzz is somewhat just like Facebook Wall posts. Isn’t it?

I don’t think so. I think this use of Buzz is pretty unique and the Facebook* pony can’t do that trick.

There are a number of Buzz features that make it possible:

1. With Buzz, you can share a permalink to a single post. This makes it possible to link to a particular post. This isn’t possible with FB Wall posts. Sharing a permalink is exactly what I did above. Here it is again.
2. Although the person above didn’t do this, you can edit your original post as you live-blog.+
3. Any comments people make will be available to the author immediately. He can reply to them completely.
4. People can pull in their friends into the live-blog by @tagging them. Powerful stuff. FB Wall posts can’t be shared at all. FB Wall post containing media can be shared, but those create copies of original post, so any changes won’t propagate.

Now this is not perfect, but it definitely is a good-enough live-blogging platform. Here is my wish list to improve upon what Buzz already has:

1. Allow people to add pictures/videos etc. as comments. This way the author as well as other people can collaborate better. Google has already demonstrated the ability to do this using Google Wave.
2. Fix the problem where any updates to the original post don’t show up in readers’ Buzz window instantly. Right now any reader will have to refresh their browser window for this to happen.
3. Related to #2 above: Any updates to comments by readers also don’t show up in author’s/other readers’ window instantly either.

Google unveiled more knobs today to make the Buzz experience better (read less spammy). Basically, you can now:

1. Choose which Buzz posts reach your Inbox.
2. Get an explanation on why a post showed up your Inbox.
3. Easily mute posts from your box using the new “Mute from Inbox” option.

Just go to Settings->Buzz in your GMail page. If it doesn’t appear, you might need to refresh – Ctrl+R will do in most browsers. Or try F5.

This should make it easier to stay focused on work… er, I mean, checking your e-mail.

Courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0 with my modifications

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Dot-com bubble. Remember those days of Internet business frenzy? I don’t. In fact, I had no clue that I had signed up for it, when I chose to emigrate to the US in the latter half of 2000. New to the fascinating Silicon Valley, I hadn’t even planted my feet firmly, that the ground started shifting. My friends and I endured it on a steady diet of ignorant optimism, unfounded hope, awe and mutual support.

Network World is marking the day with a look back at the times. For those of us,  who were caught as deers in headlights, it is an enlightening read. It starts with something probably everybody had a hint of, but never seemed to pay heed to, anyways:

“When the NASDAQ stock index hit its all-time high of 5,133 on March 10, 2000 – having more than doubled in a year — the now legendary dot-com bubble was already looking like a balloon strapped to the back of a porcupine.”

Later, come some real gems:

“First the players: A few of the names live on as poster children for failure, of course: Pets.com, Kozmo.com, MVP.com and Go.com, to cite but four from this list of “Top 10 Dot-Com Flops” by CNet.”

“One would expect that 3Com shares would be worth at least 1.5 times the value of Palm shares. But on the first day of trading after the announcement, Palm shares were worth $95.06 a share while 3Com shares fell to $81.81. The market was valuing the non-Palm part of 3Com’s business at minus $63.”

And some invaluable Internet Business myths:

• It’s okay to sell products for less than what they cost you, because that will bring you lots of customers.
• Internet-based companies are immune to economic cycles.
• Internet companies can’t spend too much on advertising.
• Internet companies that carry no inventory are infinitely profitable.

Anyways! Before everything gets too morose around here, I’ll raise a toast. After all, it’s the bubble-burst that most of us should bemoan. Not the bubble itself. Join me in the celebration… watch these videos:

After yesterday’s post on a Doubly-linked list patent, here’s a patent on patent trolling.

Patent trolling is the (now prevalent) practice of acquiring an interest in a patent and then going about suing other companies to scare them to either give up their technology or pay royalties. This patent tries to patent the said process. I would really like to see this one granted!

If Apple’s diversifying into female sanitary products business, Microsoft, not willing to be left behind, is making a bet on package delivery services. Last month, Apple introduced the much anticipated iPad. For some time we’ve been hearing about Microsoft’s new in-the-works tablet called Courier. Today, interesting photos and videos of Microsoft Courier appear in engadget.

Microsoft Courier

Although I have reservations about the split book-like design, some of the concepts really caught my eye. Having two independent screens is attractive particularly if you are used to working with more than one monitor at work. It lets you organize things a li’l better and interaction amongst multiple applications or entities becomes so much easier.

I am getting all warm-and-fuzzy thinking about an interface that supports a combination of pen and finger gestures. It seems quite a natural way to use the device. But, my engineer head tells me that the software to do that will be hard to pull off. There’s a reason iPhone kept it simple. Still, despite all its efforts, those styli are bloody hard to get rid of. Look for a very tempting application of them in the video where the artist uses them to mix colors on a palette.

Dealing with different kinds of media without going through arrays of menus is going to be more of a norm than exception.  It’s interesting to see some new takes on that here. From the looks of it, it tries to go a notch above handwriting recognition – it’s intention recognition. Put a box around a TODO list to convert it into a digital Post-it note of sorts. Flick the images around and it understands what to do with them. Again, all that seems cool in a video. How much of it happens it in reality, remains to be seen. I’ll be particularly surprised if Microsoft is able to crank out a smooth and seamless experience as shown. If they delivers this at all, that is.

I have my Facebook account integrated with Twitter. The moment I (used to) make an update to Twitter, the same update is posted to my Facebook status, through the Twitter app on Facebook.

This is still happening, but now seems to be taking like half-a-day (read forever) to update. If you have related information, please comment below.

I’m trying hard not to think that Facebook has something to do with this – intentionally or unintentionally. Especially since this happened after my Facebook got updated to the new UI.

NOTE: This post is only relevant if you use Linux or one of the modern UNIX flavored operating systems.

The Problem

Recently, I came across a problem where I needed to sync files (actually, whole directory trees) from one host to other, with the latter hiding behind another host. Here’s the arrangement just to be clear:

Arrangement of hosts for file syncing

Let’s call this host in the middle, the gateway host or just “gw“. To review the situation again, I need to copy files from host A to host B (with gw host in the middle) and back after making some changes on host B. As you can see, there are two parts to this puzzle:

1. sync files between two hosts
2. make the sync happen through the gw.

The Digression

[Skip beating around the bush and show me the solution]

There are a few scenarios when you’ll run into a syncing requirement, but a common one is when you are developing for multiple platforms. You have your source repository on A, and host B is a different hardware or software platform, or both. You copy your sources from A to B; compile; make changes on B and when you are done, copy all changes back to A. And as far as the gateway host requirement is concerned, you may need to ssh into a server on a distant network and access other hosts on an internal network connected to it.

The traditional ways to solve this problem are:

• Copy the files from A to gw and then copy them from gw to B. Reverse the procedure for file-transfer in the other direction.
• Copy the files to an external host publicly visible to both A and B. Then download these files from B. This of course requires access to an external host and network connectivity from A and B to the external host.

But, as it turns out, there’s an easier solution. We are going to exploit the capabilities of ssh to act as a remote shell to solve this problem. ssh is not only a secure shell for logging into a host, it is also a remote shell (remember rsh). In other words, it can not only log you into a remote host and give you a terminal, it can also operate in a mode where it just runs a command on the remote host and returns. We are going to exploit that feature for our own good.

Assuming that you already know how to run a remote command using ssh, I’m going to jump to the fact that you can chain multiple ssh sessions to reach a host hidden behind a remote host. For example to login directly to B from A, use the command:

ssh -t user1@gw ssh user2@hostB

The “-t” forces ssh to allocate a pseudo tty on the gw host so that it can run a terminal based program (which is ssh in this case) on it. You can do this multiple times to reach hosts hidden more than one level behind another host.

The Solution

rsync supports an external shell for connecting to a host through the “-e” command-line argument. Take a look at the rsync man page. Combining this feature with the ability of chain ssh to reach hidden hosts, we can easily sync files. Here’s the command to sync contents of dir1 on host A to contents of dir2 on host B:

rsync -av -e 'ssh -t user1@gw ssh' dir1 user2@hostB:dir2

Big and ballsy news today! One that proponents of Freedom of Speech will relish over and over:

Google says that it will operate in China without censorship or not operate at all!

I’m amazed that this is happening, even for the reasons it is happening. Google deserves applause for it, whether or not one likes Google in general.