Today, After successfully completing reading yet another book, I wanted to add that to my shelfari account but it shows me the following message.
It wants me to finish another book in the meantime. Does that mean the service is going to be down for another couple of days? I don’t know, maybe others are able to complete a book in a couple of hours.
A colorful feather up Rails’ cap is on the ground now. Twitter has decided to go away from RoR in favor of Java, this time for their entire search stack. Earlier in 2008-09, they decided to move their message queue back-end from ruby to Scala (a Java Platform) and now it is the time for their front-end to move to Java as well.
They have built a scalable platform called Blender that uses Java NIO based server (Netty) to be efficient in the face of heavy incoming traffic, replaced MySQL with a Java based Lucene search engine, created an engine that parallelizes execution of multiple backend services with dependency management and more. With this setup there is a 3X drop in search latencies and can scale to 10X more requests per machine.
Wow, that is quite an achievement. Could this mean that Java is a better platform than Rails for high scalability needs? Even if that is the case, for simpler scenarios, the beauty of RoR out-weighs Java’s performance.
They say that this change will enable them to rapidly iterate on search features in the coming months. That along with the news that Twitter has hired 25 more employees kinda tells that Java’s code base is practically more maintainable than equivalent Ruby code – at least when the code base is huge and the team size is large. Or that could mean that this time they really put a lot of thought into designing a maintainable system than when they started out. But for smaller team size and code base, RoR is still an unbeaten champion.
Imagine you are attending a party along with your friend! He plays all kind of foolish pranks and cracks stupid jokes. All along you are with him, quite enjoying his playing the fool. You come home with not a thought troubling you. Now imagine the same scenario with your brother! Even as the party progresses, you ask yourself a hundred times, “why is he behaving so silly? Why can’t he behave a bit more mature? What will my friends think of me now?”
Today is a day that celebrates friendship. So it is only proper that we contemplate a little bit on this most special relationship and what makes it so special? Among one thousand reasons the above mentioned scenario explains it the best.
“In friendship there is no place for judgment and labelling.”
Most often a problem in relationship comes only when you label somebody as your ‘husband’, ‘mother,’ ‘father’, ‘sister’ etc and once labelled you try to squeeze the individual to live according to the label. And then when they do not fit the label since they have their own characteristics we feel pained and somehow cheated. In friendship you do not label the person. He is given the freedom to be a fool, a good for nothing fellow, carefree, irresponsible and so on. You enjoy him and give him the space and freedom to be what he is. That is why while all of life is relationships; the best form of relationship is friendship.
The family in which the husband is a friend to the wife, the parent is friend to the child and vice versa, that family is heaven. Where there is no friendship in families, the story of that family will be written in tears.
So to celebrate friendship day in its true spirit would be to resolve to relate like a friend to all the members of your family. To give them freedom!
Happy friendship day!
There was an interesting question during the last Intro Session for Unlimited Power. One of the participants who attended was surprised when Kirtanya listed out the methodology of the course. She mentioned NLP, Transactional Analysis, Silva Mind control and Life-Skills as ways to tap into the Unlimited Power each one of us has within us. He was stunned to see that none of the Indian sciences were listed and was curious to know if we (Indians) did not discover anything at all in the mind power arena.
The truth is, in the ancient days there was no parallel to the Indian Sciences when it came to addressing the human mind and life. Just think about it, we had everything, a nice climate, riches, wealth, forests, rivers; we were just too bountiful. On the other hand the western hemisphere at the same time was caught up in a turmoil of wars, harsh climates; their energy was so much focused on surviving the extreme weather. The Indians having no challenges to conquer in the external world turned their entire attention inward. The mind and consciousness and human life became very interesting research subjects for them.
And so there was an outpouring of greatest of works on the science of mind itself. The yoga sutras of Patanjali, The Vedas, Vedanta, Brahma sutras, Upanishads, Yogavasishta, every one of these is a miracle even to read through. In fact, it is said that the Mahabharatha is an ultimate thesis on the various human personalities and it contains 72000 characters each representing a personality type. So India had no dearth for wisdom. Some of its treasures still stay on.
However, the same cannot be said of the modern day India. Over a century now we have been harping on the past glories. With the advent of the British rule and subsequent poverty we have become increasingly preoccupied in solving the external challenges and are oblivious to the internal ones. The roles are in a sense reversing between the west and the east. With its high levels of sophistication, pleasure in the external world, and breaking families they are increasingly searching inward for answers and so research into the human mind has picked up momentum. With technological edge they are precisely able to study the human brain itself and so are paving way for some of the greatest discoveries in human history itself.
It is actually a pity that when technology is at its peak, the brilliant Indian minds are preoccupied with selfish miseries. In the modern era we seldom shine in our ancestor’s strong forte, our inborn talent – the mind. Of course there are the modern Gurus who teach on the mind but more often than not they are mouthed words than a direct personal discovery or an experience and always tainted with a religious bias. The need of the hour is brilliant young Indian minds dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the human mind-brain organ. The aptitude for this is in our very genes. The result of such dedication will be mind boggling discoveries that will help the human species itself cross the last frontier – the mind.
Waiting for that day!
I am glad I could finally get back to blogging after a long period of hibernation. Almost an year back, me and three of my friends founded Triomatrix Webservices Private Limited, an ambitious company aimed at creating web-based services to innovatively automate businesses in India. Fanatically caught in the clutches of this marathon venture I almost forgot about everything else in life except for the ravishing beauty of our first product – www.nboomi.com.
Nboomi.com is an innovative real-estate portal from Triomatrix that literally translates the dreams of home-shoppers around the globe into a living reality. At its core, Nboomi creates a virtual world that allows home-shoppers to walk inside and experience their future home in all its splendor with just a computer and an internet connection. Being a virtual world, walking around the home is just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that, you can paint walls, tile floors, texture doors and windows, create and organize furniture and much more, all inside your favorite web browser. You are limited only by your imagination.
Very recently, we took a beta of Nboomi into the wild to field test it and I can distinctly see the attention it is attracting. At present we have successfully completed the technical component and are handing it over to the business team to take care of the sales and marketing activities. I am confident that with the right nurture and a bit of luck, Nboomi can take the real-estate field by storm.
