The Pensieve

Is the future the web OS? With more capable and feature complete browsers, it becomes easy to develop newer things that were never imagined before. To the extent of building an operating system using Flash or AJAX. Quite a few have cropped up recently. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop for a list of in-development WebOSes. So, what do I get out of a web OS? Location independence , information is stored in a central location can can be accessed over the web from anywhere. This is very much down the drain if you own a portable device or computer as you have all the info you need. But, there are instances where you may not be allowed to carry your portables, where as you might have access to the Internet where you can quickly pull out the information you need. This could be an advantage as well as a dis-advantage, the latter being, a single point of failure render non-availability / loss / leakage of your documents. But, some OSes do allow you to save your data locally a...

Paradigm shift while driving... While the preference for most while going for a car is towards performance and economy, most stop after their purchase and do not follow up in honing their skills to practice safe and economical driving... Most reviews of automobiles state the raw power and how fast the vehicle can go. Granted, a speed of 175+kmph is high for Indian roads, I do not see anyone doing this during their normal day-to-day ride which would represent more than 98% of us, commuters. The recent Ford Fiesta Max Marathon drive had helped in changing the way people drive their cars. This is a different race, not focused on speed and time, but on economy and mileage. A few do's and dont's that worked out for me: Plan to use the brakes less . Fuel is spent in keeping the vehicle running. Brakes reduces the efficiency by introducing friction and thus limiting the speed. Which means that you start planning ahead to avoid the brake. You then tend to leave ample space betw...

UI hall of shame: Error messages... Here is something that I saw when Windows Media Player 11 reported an error while installing updates: Updates cannot be installed is more simpler and concise...

The Project Management Professional Harboring from http://www.pmi.org, have started the PMP certification drive and plan to take the exam in the near feature. I'm planning to post the study notes and thoughts on the blog. With the certification a requirement now-a-days, let's see if it is really worth and applicable in the project management front...

Architectural Patterns and kernels Monolithic architecture - Exposes a high level interface where with core services closely coupled with each other. Linux and other monolithic kernels provide a high level system call API and internally, services like memory management, I/O etc are tightly coupled. Pro: Performance Con: Defect on one service may affect other services Microkernel architecture - Services decoupled and run on own process. Use message passing mechanism to communicate with each other to reduce coupling. Pro: Easy to extend or add new features. Malfunctioning service can be restarted without affecting others Con: Slower Hybrid kernels - Micro kernels that have non-essential code in kernel space for efficiency. Microsoft Windows NT and strains are an example Exokernels - Provides a library for core OS features (in terms of the developer requesting particular pages of memory or blocks of diskspace). Application developer builds on top. Multiple li...

Some Behavioral Patterns Visitor: Abstracts operations on a data structure and to avoid making changes to existing data structures. Allows new operations to be added without changing data structures Strategy: Abstracts similar algorithms so that it can be interchanged without affecting the data structure. Used to eliminate switch-case statements Iterator: Provides a unified mechanism to traverse data structures without encapsulating the traversal logic

Welcome to the Pensieve! In here, you can find random thoughts that capture my interests. My interest, which happens to vary with time currently stands at architecting software systems, following news on open source front, Linux, UML, various modeling techniques, reading books and articles on management, software and science fiction and of course listening to music.