Published by Vinayak Hegde on 26th November 2008
ACM November 2008 edition had two talks:
Dr Ravi Gudi from Honeywell research gave a talk on Decomposition Paradigms for Large Scale Systems. Dr Ravi Gudi has studied at IIT Bombay and is currently working with the research team at Honeywell Technology Solutions. Using the example of building a chemical refinery and a railway workyard, he explained how to design and manage a large scale system by breaking it down into smaller parts using various techniques. Two of the techniques for decomposition that he talked about are model co-ordination and goal co-ordination. He talked about optimisation problems such as placements of sensors in an area to collect data and transmit it back effectively. The other problem he talked about is communication and feedback while accounting for the delay in transmission. There has been some interesting research in this area at CMU. Some of these fundamental problems see applications in social networks, scheduling in multi-core systems and building Internet scale distributed systems such as CDNs. For example the cascade algorithm invented at CMU can be applied for ranking blogs by number of unique breaking stories. It tells you which blogs should you follow to get the maximum amount of information with the least amount of effort. The same Cascades algorithm can also be used for getting optimal placment of sensors at least cost. Communication in Large scale systems is also facilitated by techniques such as the gossip protocol. Amazon uses the gossip protocol for communication between it’s machines in it’s AWS datacenters. However this communication method overloaded Amazon’s servers and led to a outage.
Prakash Venkatraman, Senior Architect at Oracle talked about using Signature matching and rule-based matching systems for diagnosing faults in systems (root cause analysis). Taking the example of Oracle Support system, he explained how by looking at the error logs and mointoring different parameters, you can build and deduce rules which can be used for fault analysis. Using Bayesian probability and using statistical co-relation techniques such as that used in filtering spam, the whole process of doing fault analysis can be automated to make the work of humans easier.
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 24th November 2008
The Krishna temple was built by the Krishnadevaraya who ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire in 1513 AD to celebrate the conquest of the eastern kingdom of Udayagiri or Utkala (in the present day Orissa state). The temple is built in such as way that the inner sanctum of the temple (seen in the picture) is well lit up throughout the day by small cavities in the roof which let the sunlight through.The temple is currently not used for workship and the main idol of the temple has been removed.
The carvings are spectacular with the Yalis (the mythical lion) on the pillars and the entrances to the temple hall flanged with impressive carvings of elephant balustrades. This is one of the few temples where the epic stories carved on the walls of the tower. This is fairly an intact specimen of a Vijayanagara era temple.
More technical details about the photo at my photoblog (click on Image Info).
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 18th November 2008
Some interesting highlights:
- The top 3 ports at which attacks were directed were Microsoft DS (449), NetBIOS (139) and Microsoft RPC (135). These 3 ports accounted for more than 50% of the attack traffic out of the 2400 ports at which attacks were directed.
- Vulnerabilities were found in core Internet protocols such as TCP, DNS and BGP and were being actively exploited.
- Asian countries improved their Internet connectivity with the rest of the world as new undersea cables were commisioned
- The Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark) have the most internet penetration and but Far-East Asian countries (South Korea and Japan) had the fastest broadband connectivity.
More detailed information is available in the downloadable PDF
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 13th November 2008
Bangkok is a bustling city and a tourist hotspot; prominent attractions being the
Grand Palace and
Wat Pho (the temple of reclining buddha). The lion is one of the insignia of the king and featured over all the arches of the Chakri Maha Prasat Hall. The architecture of Chakri Maha Prasat Hall is a mixture of Thai (the roof and the embellishments) and European styles (rest of the structure including the landscaped garden in front of the palace). Interestingly the
kings of Thailand all take the name Rama (suffixed by their number in the dynasty) on ascending the throne.
More technical details about the photo at my photoblog (click on Image Info).
Published by Vinayak Hegde on 11th November 2008
The November edition of Startup Saturday Bangalore featured a talk by Sharda Balaji of Novojuris on “Legal pitfalls of a startup”. This was followed by the demo of citizenmatters.in by Meera K and Subramaniam Vincent.
Sharda Balaji is the founder and director of Novojuris which provides legal services to startups and entrepreneurs in the technology domain. She has managed the legal aspects of the Purvankara IPO and was previously working with Intel Technology India. She said that every entrepreneur should understand the concept and the intent of the law. Entrepreneurs address legal matters reactively only when they encounter difficulties which can cause complications and loss. She gave a brief overview of the legal forms for incorporating the company. Having worked with a corporate big law team as well as on her own she was able to give an insider’s perspective on how law firms operate and what are the criteria which a entrepreneur should follow while engaging with a lawyer or a law firm.
She also addressed some other issues such as capital structure of a company, equity allocation between founders and dilution during funding rounds. This was followed by an interesting and interactive discussion on moonlighting and skunkworks projects. Several entrepreneurs moonlight on their startups while working for another firm. They should clarify with their company’s policies regarding regarding intellectual property and conflict of interest agreements with their legal counsel. If this due diligence is not done, it can cause problems later on when the startup is incorporated even when the entrepreneurs has left his previous job. Her presentation is embedded below:
Citizen Matters is a Bangalore focused and citizen-oriented news publication. They publish in-depth news, analysis, features, opinions, and information/event listings, covering city public affairs, community and culture in Bangalore city. Citizen Matters is published by Oorvani Media, an independent local media firm founded by Bangaloreans Subramaniam Vincent and Meera K. Bangalore is a city in transition, with much of the growth of the city spurred with the help of migrants who fail to connect with the city. As a result many of the migrants are unaware of the local culture and local issues. This problem is not limited to migrant population but also to the people who have been living in the city for decades. Citizen matters deals with this problem by commissioning articles on local issues and by using citizen journalism. Currently, this is one area where mainstream media is found lacking.
Citizen Matters is built on Ruby on Rails and extensively uses open source software. Citizen matters is a for-profit startup which plans to raise money by selling advertising and doing public-funded journalism. One of the suggestions was to raise money using micropayments from readers to cover local issues such as traffic problems or development of lakes. There was a good interactive discussion on social media and the use of technology which followed this. Do visit their site at citizenmatters.in. The presentation by Citizen Matters is embedded below:
