Clear and present danger

October 9th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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.

obsessing about bdb, queues

October 9th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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 ;) .

Social media primer for politicians

October 9th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

It has been something that has been going on in my head for a significant amount of time and I believe that it is the right time for politicians and famous individuals to take their online reputation management as seriously as the offline one. Here, i will outline a very basic strategy that i believe will equip celebrities and politicians to strengthen their brands.

So lets start with some assumptions that will make our lives easier as the post goes on.

  • Paid advertising stand-alone is not an effective way of reaching out.
  • A holistic or integrated approach towards internet marketing is what will allow long-term gains.
  • Like most blog posts, this is highly subjective. Feel free to improve, argue, debate any points.

So with this initial setup we can charge into how a politician X can become an online brand.

Goals

To plan for the next coming elections, which means that it has to be a sustained campaign over the next 2-3 years to make a meaningful impact.

It also has to ensure that he remains at a peak during his election times, and is able to sustain public interaction at a locality level.

Mechanisms available

We all seem to assume that social media, by default is the internet. In a country with nearly 430 million wireless connections, a strategy also needs to address the offline, but mobile populace.

So here is a list of potential ways of reaching the user using social media

  • Internet – Blogs / content
  • Mobile (SMS, MMS or GPRS)
  • Internet – Social networks
  • and many more …

The list can go on, but it is all dependant on the target audience which may be some remote district in West Bengal (India).
Why ? Why not ?

“One does not fit all”, and that is the reality. I would love to use social media to create and enhance everybody’s reputation. For an example, an MLA from a remote bihar village has no use for social media in his political career (unless of course he has national / state level ambitions).

Cosmopolitan cities like kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore have all shown that the internet may emerge as a potentially important mechanism for party propaganda as well as reputation management.

So if you guys want to have a chat with me discussing this further, do comment or email me at me@dipankar.name.

bangalore, h1n1 and queues

September 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

So for that last one week a major area of work has been queues and here are the various queues that i encountered

  • memqueuedb - a speedy message queue based upon the memcached client protocol. The idea was to use it to cache certain objects in a system.
  • JMS – Seems to be an integral part of my J2EE learning, this is what often defines performance in an application. Especially when good high speed JMS library implementation cost big money.
  • Airport taxi queue – Now you get in line to get a coupon for a taxi (10 people ahead of you) and then you get on a line with 40 people ahead of you all waiting for taxis at My capital city airport. Awesome. (Did I just see a newspaper whack me on the head :P )
  • Python queue(or Queue) - The real star :) , it actually is well synchronised with locking and all. Quite a rock star data structure he he, must use one of these days for something.

That was the end of the queue rant. Forgiveness for having to bear that. Next on line is Bangalore, I regret carrying a camera as it is super picturesque. Though once i landed the really really dusty air got to me. So by day 2, I ended up with a fever. Sorry to Pallav, and the rest of my friends whom i could not catch up with.

Any how, the point is the first question I asked myself do I have H1n1 (aka swine flu). To make sure i did not, i have taken the pains to outline a checklist for symptoms for the same.

  1. fever
  2. cough
  3. sore throat
  4. body aches
  5. headache
  6. chills
  7. fatigue

Now I did not have 4,5,6 and 7, but just for precaution am going to the doctor and getting myself tested. The only way to stop this from becoming the “plague” of our generation, is that we all consciously take precautions (especially when you can afford to, which I believe most of my readers can).

It is 100% treatable (well, that is what they say) when diagonosis is early. Tamiflu is also going to be available at drug stores. Take care everyone.

Twitter background generator version 0.1

September 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Working on a very basic twitter background generator, right now focusing on how to get the sidebar width right. It is very much under use at my twitter handle @dipankarsarkar (http://twitter.com/dipankarsarkar). The core idea is to be abe to communicate more information about what i do as a person using the background image. Some features that I personally want are

  • Transparency for the sidebar – The image underneath should be visible, right now its a grey opaque color.
  • A right sidebar – After some research , I figured out that the safest and optimal width to cater for is 1200px, with the core content on the left sidebar though. More thoughts on that as I deploy some new changes.
  • Better fonts – Although new fonts / languages can be deployed. The code is not flexible enough right now to add new fonts.

That is a long enough list for the day :) , attaching the background with this as well. Let me know in case having cool backgrounds excite you.

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