Through Dipankar's looking glass

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Just got a new server to play with the corenetworks guys are awesome ! The bandwidth is good, they are bloody straight forward about what works and what does not.

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I am starting from nothing, very little tweeting @dipankarsarkar , and hardly any blog posts here. So 1st December is an attempt at reviving my non-existent web presence. So what keeps me so busy from even writing a simple blog post, i will try to summarize that over the next points

• Sometime a year back i realized that family was important , so yes i definitely spend a lot more time with my family. It has been a really good thing for me personally. Lots of things have worked out which will be crucial going forward.
• Last year, i was working at mpower mobile working with some of India’s best python coders (Sirtaj and Supreet) which really has made me realize the what i was missing out on before. The existence of FOSS.IN was not known to me before that, an honest admission. Guess, Delhi (especially IIT) did not have the culture where i could get exposed to such things back then. Spent some more time figuring out what i wanted to learn technically.
• Kwippy was a great experience, that would be another 5 blog posts of ranting to get it out of my system. Right now, its kind of fallen off the grid and the void really hurts. It will be back, but still resolving my personal issues with what i really want to do next as an entrepreneur. Huge learning’s out of it in project management & team building.
• Started working on new things in the mean while looking at Social enterprises through STIR-e and Social media through Electrosocial, they really had me working and learning things that i am sure books cannot teach. The details of running an organization can get completely sidelined when one is thinking about the potential of the idea at hand, it is a major impedance towards learning more.
• Internet in India is growing but not at a pace where we can talk about scaling and crazy architecture. Mobile in India is however another story all together, the problems that they face are truly challenging in scale and complexity. So in a lot of ways, i am looking at mobile as the key vertical to work in technically.
• Right now, i am looking for an internet or mobile opportunity in New Delhi. So that is the next immediate challenge at hand.

Question is why so many things, the answer is fairly simple i guess. There is so much to do and learn, as long as time and resources can be managed. Of course, in due time one must push concepts that survive the test of time and have the potential to win and make it big.

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This title is reminiscent of the Harrison Ford movie, but is very applicable to how my country (India) goes about its foreign policy. As a rather naive spectator to the global policy game, here are some conclusions that I have based my current statement on.

• Being rather country-locked, and especially nations that are in a constant state of political flux. We are in a tremendous disadvantage, unable to appease them or take control of them.
• Our “friendly” neighbors are currently in the cashing in phase, due to the games between China and us. We have been unable to use our cultural proximity as an advantage, rather we are playing the finance and buy-out stratagem which on its own we have already lost.
• Our utter neglect of the North east, (or the east as a whole) is paying rich dividends to the Chinese. As a country of smart people, we are really slow at learning things which Mao embedded into the communist psyche a long time back rather publicly. They will eventually take what they believe is rightly theirs, even if it means war.
• UN and common currency - Its a farce, with Nehru helping the Chinese to get the security council and they consistently refusing us entry into that club(with our huge standing army). It is a rather on the face statement about what they think of us at this point of time. The common currency move is good, but with the move from uni-polar to a multi-polar configuration it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
• US in my opinion is on the back foot – Consistent rise of nationalists in Japan, the economic crisis, the dollar, Iraq, Afganistan, and so on … Yes, their bulk has kept them alive, they are pros at keeping themselves in the game. It would be interesting to see what is the next move they make. Fingers crossed.
• So there is the need of a bigger war, one where the significant people advantage of the asians gets reduced. (from the developed nation perspective). Pakistan seems to be the point from where all it will possibly emanate.

Enough of brain dumping, back to work.

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So my nightmares do no cease to end, still debating queue solutions and databases. After spending a lot of time thinking about how to handle 100 million entries , concurrency and a lot of jazz here are some conclusions that I have reached.

• Tokyo Tyrant needs some testing personally. Can it work well within a constrained VPS ? I doubt that after reading all the test results. So need to do a benchmark for this.
• Tornado , the friendfeed (facebook) non-blocking server looks cool. The primary issues are the lack of an plugin architecture much like django or rails, guess that is something i can give back to them (if and when i start working on it).
• Python set lookups are blazing fast, in a benchmark today it beat lists lookup (800000 entries) by 10 times

Feeling much better after the flu, I hope to write more often so that the ether (ie the internet) can crawl and archive my existence .