We recently started off on a couple of projects that target the JVM. The team had no prior Java experience but had worked on C#/.Net. We found Java tedious and ceremonial and decided to investigate the other languages that target the JVM – Groovy, Scala and Clojure. These notes summarize findings based on my interpretation [...]
Dec 092009
Jun 112009
We recently augmented the team working on our desktop product. At the core of the product is XMPP – the protocol that drives several instant messaging servers and clients, sites like Chesspark and now Google Wave. Since XMPP is not known by many people, let alone be understood well enough, every time we on-board someone [...]
May 242009
When the Twitter reply feature tweak story started breaking, my first reaction was – this could be us in future. Watching Twitter struggle with the change and the backlash it generated was a big public lesson in product design, tech implementation and communications, and I thought I should document it here, lest I ever forget [...]
May 012009
One of the cornerstones of the .PW platform is the Wall – the real time aggregate of activities being done by an entity and its network. So while I am personally rather inactive on the various social networks (way too distracting), the recent announcement by FB on opening up their feed via activity streams led [...]
Apr 212009
After publishing my previous post, I had thought that I would not be coming back to Crypto for a while. However, today evening Sebastiaan posted on SCRAM on one of the Directi mailing lists, and I got compelled to write down this one. Authentication in Cryptography has two aspects: data authentication and entity authentication. Data [...]
Apr 202009
Most developers whom I have come across, lack a solid grasp of the fundamentals of cryptography. When a developer who does not understand crypto needs to use crypto, several things can go wrong: • Not understanding the implications of using some crypto technology in the code• Not realizing where to use crypto• Not implementing crypto [...]
Dec 112008
I have never been a UI guy, my focus being mostly on databases and middleware. Sure I know HTML / CSS / XAML, but my knowledge here is far less than what I know about the other tiers. In any case this is from a development point of view – whatever little I do know [...]
Oct 292008
Microsoft’s application platform has now got a shade of the sky – Azure was formally announced at the PDC yesterday by Ray Ozzie in his opening keynote address. I have said this several times in the past – computing going forward is going to be all about parallelization. On the client, parallelization of code is [...]
Sep 102008
No this is not a line from a new novel by Douglas Adams, but our regular doomsayers. Yessir, not only have we become powerful enough to destroy the Universe, we are foolish enough to do it too! So after several failed warnings, finally the end of the world is in sight and you do not [...]
Aug 152008
Yesterday was my last working day at Microsoft India. When I joined Microsoft in Oct 2001, I never thought this day would come. After all, joining Microsoft was a dream, and when I finally did join the company, I thought I am going to be here for life. However, when you have lived a dream [...]
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