Fonts for Language Translations

According to Census of India of 2001, 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000, so I think this makes lots of sense to provide wwl support for Indian Languages. I was thinking of projects like Indian "Ayurveda Wiki" and "Indian Agriculture and its Market Wiki" for a long time, but most of the knowledge required for this kind of project is in the hands of our parent's generation, for them language is a problem. So in order to implement such a project we need to have translation engines (even though accuracy is a problem).

WWL seems a good solution, but in order to provide translations in multiple languages we need fonts for those languages. So what is a solution for this? FaaS yes it is a cloud solution Font as Service.

Fonts for the web page will be served from some cloud based font server, this is implemented in Firefox 3.5 onwards, read more on @font-face support in Firefox here. They also implemented Web Open Font Format(WOFF) see more here. There are multiple companies which Provide FasS service, see TypeKit and Fontdeck which is about to launch the service. Read more on FaaS here. But the problem with these FaaS service is lack of Fonts support for language translation, TypeKit and most of font foundries provide only English Fonts, yes I agree with reality that English fonts are the ones which is commonly used. But for the people who dream of a polyglot internet FaaS which provide Fonts for all the languages in the world is a necessity, and an integration with services like WWL is a dream comes true.

wwl and the polyglot internet

 Ethan Zuckerman's speech on The Future of Internet

The first wave of the Internet revolution changed expectations about the availability of information. Information that was stored in libraries, locked in government vaults or available only to subscribers was suddenly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A second wave has changed expectations about who creates information online. Tens of millions of people are contributing content to the modern Internet, publishing photos, videos and blogposts to a global audience.
The globalization of the Internet has brought connectivity to almost 1.3 billion people. The Internet that results from globalization and user-authorship is profoundly polyglot. Wikipedia is now available in more than 210 languages, which implies that there are communities capable of authoring content in those tongues. Weblog search engine Technorati sees at least as many blogposts in Japanese as in English, and some scholars speculate that there may be as much Chinese content created on sites like Sina and QQ as on all English-language blogs combined. Read the complete story here.

Is something happening on the polyglot internet front? yes check out

TED Open Translation Project: This projects will translate TED talks in multiple languages as subtitles. The project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators.
Global Voices Lingua Project :  Here volunteers will translate blog posts into many different languages.
Google Translate :  No Introduction required, it is from google.
Pootle: Something like Google Translate but open source
Yamli and Meedan : For Arabic translations.
dotSUB : Translated videos

But there is something else which interest me more, it is WWL or http://www.worldwidelexicon.org/ , it is providing a web API as in the cloud age so any web using this APIs can provide translations of its contents. Read on this The End Of The Language Barrier, this is a complete open source stuff, and find out all you want here.

If you are interested, read on Social Media Exchange, and A Web That Speaks Your Languae.

IIM CAT slipped down with a virus hit

The IIM CAT is in big trouble after a virus  hit, now they are planning to conduct paper based exam again for the aspirants.

When I was reading theses in the newspaper, I thought why IIM itself couldn't conduct these exams, or startup a company for this (they can hatch a lot in the incubator) and why they are going for US companies like Prometric, is it because it's website has all the tests in the world listed on it? I think startup will be a good option because India will conduct lots of test and Indians love to top those exams, and Indian criteria for success is marks. This is something bad from IIMs since their job is to startup new companies and create jobs for jobless millions, may be the heat inside the incubator is not proper.

Open source will come as a big help for these startups. checkout somethings like
Pareeksha : I doubt this as a Malayalam word, but the creators are Deutsch.
TCExam : I have no comments just check it out.
eXam : exam module for Plone CMS

We have some open source tools for course management in universities. Check out Moodle, Clarolin and Sakai. Will google chrome OS makes any sense in conducting Online exams? I think it is.

There are "Brave Hearts" out there who do cool things

I cannot stop posting this inspirational talk from Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB, the thing behind Ubuntu One, Mozilla's Raindrop etc. This video is from RubyFringe Conference, find the video from InfoQ. Also have a look at his blog here.

Chrome Book: Are you ready for playing around?

Chrome OS source code is released to the public. You can get preview of Chrome Book here, see it boots up in 7 seconds.

You can find everything you needed regarding Chrome OS (Documentation and Videos) here and the source code here . Is it bug free? no i don't think so after seeing this list. How it achieves 7 seconds boot time? It needs solid state drive (It will not support booting from hard disk) and custom firmware, so on what all hardware Chrome OS will run? see the list Hey Hey see that page has a warning message "Warning: This page is for developers who both know how to build Chromium OS and aren't afraid to take a screwdriver to their computer." 

There are some important comments from Sundar Pichai, Google's VP of Product Management.

• You cannot download and install Chrome on any machine. You will have to buy a new one. we only support solid-state drives and certain types of WiFi cards.
• If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.
• Google demoed Chrome OS on an Eee PC.
• In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works.
• you could build it and run it in a virtual machine. That’s a great way to compile and debug.

Can you see the Chrome Book's (Eee PC) login window below, are u expecting it to work Desktop PC way?, no it will not work that way, you need a Google account (may be an OpenID), it uses "pam_google" module to Authenticate it. If you are out of Internet then you won't be able to login to the system, they are planning to add off line support using google gears.

Three Stories

This is my second installment of philosophical blog, hey don't worry this will also be the last. This is a speech delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University in 2005, this is a speech which inspired me to live a free life (Free Man), a life influenced by my own thinking (at least near to that). I found the speech here.



I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Don’t be serious, Be sincere

Lat Friday I was sitting outside the office with my friend, we were discussing on work and life matters, then he told he will forward me Chetan Bhagat's speech which he gave for new batch of MBA students at Symbiosis, Pune. Today I got the mail, but I felt it as incomplete so I searched the web for speech and found it here. If you are my kind of person who feels unbalanced life often, this will be helpful. Hey don't take this as serious. A good read.

Good Morning everyone and thank you for giving me this chance to speak to you. This day is about you. You, who have come to this college, leaving the comfort of your homes (or in some cases discomfort), to become something in your life. I am sure you are excited. There are few days in human life when one is truly elated.  The first day in college is one of them.  When you were getting ready today, you felt a tingling in your stomach. What would the auditorium be like, what would the teachers be like, who are my new classmates – there is so much to be curious about. I call this excitement, the spark within you that makes you feel truly alive today. Today I am going to talk about keeping the spark shining. Or to put it another way, how to be happy most, if not all the time.

Where do these sparks start? I think we are born with them. My 3-year old twin boys have a million sparks. A little Spiderman toy can make them jump on the bed. They get thrills from creaky swings in the park. A story from daddy gets them excited. They do a daily countdown for birthday party – several months in advance – just for the day they will cut their own birthday cake.

I see students like you, and I still see some sparks. But when I see older people, the spark is difficult to find. That means as we age, the spark fades. People whose spark has faded too much are dull, dejected, aimless and bitter. Remember Kareena in the first half of Jab We Met vs the second half? That is what happens when the spark is lost.   So how to save the spark?

Imagine the spark to be a lamp’s flame. The first aspect is nurturing – to give your spark the fuel, continuously. The second is to guard against storms.

To nurture, always have goals. It is human nature to strive, improve and achieve full potential. In fact, that is success. It is what is possible for you. It isn’t any external measure – a certain cost to company pay package, a particular car or house.

Most of us are from middle class families. To us, having material landmarks is success and rightly so. When you have grown up where money constraints force everyday choices, financial freedom is a big achievement. But it isn’t the purpose of life. If that was the case, Mr. Ambani would not show up for work. Shah Rukh Khan would stay at home and not dance anymore. Steve Jobs won’t be working hard to make a better iPhone, as he sold Pixar for billions of dollars already. Why do they do it? What makes them come to work everyday? They do it because it makes them happy. They do it because it makes them feel alive Just getting better from current levels feels good. If you study hard, you can improve your rank. If you make an effort to interact with people, you will do better in interviews. If you practice, your cricket will get better. You may also know that you cannot become Tendulkar, yet. But you can get to the next level. Striving for that next level is important.

Nature designed with a random set of genes and circumstances in which we were born. To be happy, we have to accept it and make the most of nature’s design. Are you? Goals will help you do that. I must add, don’t just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order.

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.

You must have read some quotes – Life is a tough race, it is a marathon or whatever. No, from what I have seen so far, life is one of those races in nursery school, where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same with life, where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die.

One last thing about nurturing the spark – don’t take life seriously. One of my yoga teachers used to make students laugh during classes. One student asked him if these jokes would take away something from the yoga practice. The teacher said – don’t be serious, be sincere. This quote has defined my work ever since. Whether its my writing, my job, my relationships or any of my goals. I get thousands of opinions on my writing everyday. There is heaps of praise, there is intense criticism. If I take it all seriously, how will I write? Or rather, how will I live? Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It’s ok, bunk a few classes, goof up a few interviews, fall in love. We are people, not programmed devices.

I’ve told you three things – reasonable goals, balance and not taking it too seriously that will nurture the spark. However, there are four storms in life that will threaten to completely put out the flame. These must be guarded against. These are disappointment, frustration, unfairness and loneliness of purpose.

Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don’t go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you. But it’s life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember – if you are failing at something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that’s where you want to be.

Disappointment’ s cousin is  Frustration, the second storm.  Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don’t know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to  a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions in your life – friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously.

Unfairness – this is hardest to deal with, but unfortunately that is how our country works. People with connections, rich dads, beautiful faces, pedigree find it easier to make it – not just in Bollywood, but everywhere. And sometimes it is just plain luck. There are so few opportunities in India, so many stars need to be aligned for you to make it happen. Merit and hard work is not always linked to achievement in the short term, but the long term correlation is high, and ultimately things do work out. But realize, there will be some people luckier than you. In fact, to have an opportunity to go to college and understand this speech in English means you are pretty damm lucky by Indian standards. Let’s be grateful for what we have and get the strength to accept what we don’t. I have so much love from my readers that other writers cannot even imagine it. However, I don’t get literary praise. It’s ok. I don’t look like Aishwarya Rai, but I have two boys who I think are more beautiful than her. It’s ok. Don’t let unfairness kill your spark.

Finally, the last point that can kill your spark is Isolation. As you grow older you will realize you are unique. When you are little, all kids want Ice cream and Spiderman. As you grow older to college, you still are a lot like your friends. But ten years later and you realize you are unique. What you want, what you believe in, what makes you feel, may be different from even the people closest to you. This can create conflict as your goals may not match with others. And you may drop some of them. Basketball captains in college invariably stop playing basketball by the time they have their second child. They give up something that meant so much to them. They do it for their family. But in doing that, the spark dies. Never, ever make that compromise. Love yourself first, and then others.

There you go. I’ve told you the four thunderstorms – disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die.

I welcome you again to the most wonderful  years of your life. If someone gave me the choice to go back in time, I will surely choose college. But I also hope that ten years later as well, your eyes will shine the same way as they do today. That you will Keep the Spark alive, not only through college, but through the next 2,500 weekends. And I hope not just you, but my whole country will keep that spark alive, as we really need it now more than any moment in history. And there is something cool about saying – I come from the land of a billion sparks.

Thank You.

Open Source and ERP

ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) is a familiar term inside the corporate world. This is very helpful to the people who use the term "Resources" very frequently, guess who? "the Managers". Ever wondered what will be the cost of this back office automation tool? A well thought out and clean implementation of ERP is very good asset for a company, but this rarely happens says Panorama Consulting Group's report. It says

1) 93 percent of ERP implementations takes longer than expected.
2) 59 percent of implementations costs more than initially estimated.
3) only 13 percent of companies says they are "very satisfied" with their ERP implementation.

In addition to these problems companies need to pay annually 22 percent of licensing fees as maintenance and support fee (SAP and Oracle), last year SAP hiked this from 17 percent to 22 percent.  According to Forrester Research many of the customers already question the value of their existing basic support contracts at 17 percent and a whopping 85 percent expressed minimal utilization of the existing basic support offerings.If theses companies pays these huge amount, are they getting what they want?, answer is a big NO,there are a plenty of examples where key functionality requested two to four years ago by multiple customers in the same or different industries were not delivered.

An alternative solution is opting for third party support and maintenance  service, like Rimini and TomorrowNow. Rimini offers support for SAP, PeopleSoft (Oracle) etc. TomorrowNow is acquired and closed down by SAP, see the story here, another corporate war. 

Will Open Source ERP suites solve any of these issues. I think it will solve majority of the issues.

1) No licensing cost or low licensing cost (if you choose commercial open source ERP solutions).
2) Wide support from open source active community.
3) Innovation and low feature development time.
4) No annual service or maintenance fees.
5) More players to offer commercial support.

Now lets see what all open source ERP suites are available for us.

OpenBravo :  Along with open source ERP suite, it offers cloud based ERP services (SaaS).  It has a good wiki which will be very usefull for the implementors.

OpenERP : It also offers a cloud based ERP service. Its community site is here . Here is a paper which compares several open source, unfortunately that is in french, so I used a complicated algorithm (machine + human translation) (actually google translate and my corrections : ) ) and the result is here.

OfBiz : This is a framework from Apache which allow us to create various ERP suites.

OpenTaps : This is ERP suite developed using Apache OfBiz Framework.

Another paper which compares open source ERP suites is here.

SixthSense : A wearable gestural interface

SixthSense: I am not talking about 1999 Hollywood Psychological thriller, I am taking about a gestural interface that allow us to use natural hand gestures to interact with computers. This is developed by a team of students from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT.





Pranav Mistry the top brain behind sixthsense is planning to open source the entire source code in less than a months time, he told in a TED India meet in Bangalore.

Storage POD: Open Source Storage Hardware

POD Storage means Portable on Demand Storage. Recently Online Storage providers BackBlaze open sourced its cheap stoarge hardware design.

Entire open sourced design is given in backblaze's blog. The blackblaze's storage needs complex software to make this cheap hardware a online storage. Most of the software stack is based on open source software components, the rest of the software stack is proprietary. It is upto you, the real hackers to do the rest, open source is not for lazy players, it is for people who love hacking around. check out somethings like FreeNAS.

Don Honabach the Hacker :) designed a extreme media server for personal use using backblaze design, check it out in his blog.

Open Source Hardware: Heat is on

Looks like Open source hardware is following Open Source Software way. In previous blogs we discussed Free Telephony project and Bug Labs's Tridgets.

In 2002 Jim Turley predicted bleak future for open source hardware even though open source software is successful in embedded.com.
According to him support, cost, tools, knowledge  and manufacturing are the major problems. I will go through these one by one.

Support: Is this a problem only with open hardware, this is will be there for any product which is sold in the market, for this either you buy the support or do it yourself. Payed support will be available from the company which sells the open source hardware products in the market (Just like RedHat in Open Source Software), only thing is you need to pay for that. In the case of do it yourself open source hardware is far better than proprietary hardware, since the entire design is open it is easy for you to fix the bug or enhancing the design.

Cost:Yes Hardware is a costlier thing, developing a new hardware and coming up with a new revision of hardware will cost you money. Will it change if it is proprietary hardware? I think it will cost you more. Let's think from the side of a hardware developer, will the cost take away the interest of the developer from open source development, no I think because every developer coming to community is has some motives in order to achieve this he will be ready to spend some minimal money or personal effort (Just see the number of open source hardware projects coming up, this will become clear).  An once a company start(see ATCOM) selling products based on this, it will also help the community. Then manufacturing cost of hardware coming down because of  cheap labor available from india and China, see the Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign comment.He says hardware business may be getting easier due to ready-made manufacturing capacity in China, which is driving down the cost of building hardware. The FPGA cost is coming down drastically, this is a very good thing for open source hardware, this has the potential to give more strength to open source hardware movement. 

Tools: Yes hardware tools are costly, but who are actually contributing to open source hardware, People who contribute to open source hardware are working already with some hardware company or people who are passionate about that, so both of them will have tools which is needed even if open source hardware is not there.

Knowledge: This  is a problem with lazy guys, both open source software and hardware require knowledge, both are equally complex.

So getting back to open source hardware itself, it is licensed under various licenses
GNU LGPL, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, MIT License, Ballon Open Hardware License, Hardware Design  Public License, TAPR Open Hardware License etc.

Now lets take a took at the popular open hardware projects.

OPLC: The One Laptop per Child association develops a low-cost laptop to revolutionize how we educate the world's children. These Laptops are manufactured by a company called Quanta Computer.

Free Telephony Project: This project develops low cost telephony hardware for developing countries. A Chinese company ATCOM is manufacturing these devices.

Beagle Board: The Beagle Board is a low-power, low-cost Single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key, designed with open source development in mind.

GumStix: Gumstix was initially the name of a single-board computer, developed as a hobby project by Gordon Kruberg. While the design of the main computer boards has always been proprietary, designs for expansion boards are published under a Creative Commons Share-alike license.

OpenMoko: Project aiming to create a customizable, open source smartphone platform based on GNU/Linux. But this project is not in good condition now.

OpenCore: OpenCores is a loose community of people who are interested in developing digital open source hardware through electronic design automation, with a similar ethos to the free software movement.

BugLabs: See the earlier pos.

Arduino: Arduino is a physical computing platform based on a simple open hardware design for a single-board microcontroller.

VIA OpenBook: VIA OpenBook is a free and open laptop reference design from VIA Technologies. It was announced in 2008.

Sun SPOT: It is a wireless sensor network mote developed by Sun Microsystems.

PLAICE: The PLAICE, or FLASH-PLAICE, is a powerful open source hardware device, combining a flash memory programmer, in-circuit emulation, and a high-speed multi-channel logic analyzer.

OpenSPARC: OpenSPARC is an open-source processor project to which Sun Microsystems have contributed the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 multicore processor designs.

LEON: LEON is a 32-bit CPU microprocessor core, based on the SPARC-V8 RISC architecture and instruction set.

OpenBTS: OpenBTS is an amazing project to build a GSM base station using open source software and hardware. It uses Asterisk as the back end, and can work with standard GSM handsets.

Village Telco: The Village Telco is an initiative to assemble and/or develop the cheapest, easiest-to-setup, easiest-to-manage, scalable, standards-based, wireless local do-it-yourself telephone company toolkit in the world.

Open Graphics Project: The Open Graphics Project (OGP) is developing graphics cards with Free-licensed specifications and Free Software drivers.


Hey! time to stop, see you on next blog.

welcome to ntop community

I found ntop as a good project, but which very much lacks a community. So this is my humble first effort to help that community. I will give preliminary materials which helped me to learn about ntop, I hope this will help others also. Still I am not a contributor to that project, just in the initial phase of code browsing.

Digging Deeper Into Deep Packet Inspection  pdf
The BSD Packet Filter: A New Architecture for User-level Packet Capture pdf
Effective Traffic Measurement Using ntop pdf
Ntop Overview pdf
Bloom Filters pdf
Monitoring high-speed networks using ntop pdf
Packet Capture in 10-Gigabit Ethernet Environments Using Contemporary Commodity Hardware pdf
Understand packet processing with multi-core processors pdf
Improving Passive Packet Capture: Beyond Device Polling pdf
Ntop, persistent data and rrd pdf
Introduction to RRD (Round Robin DataBase) html
Optimizing Packet Capture on SMP pdf
Wire-speed Packet Capture and Transmission pdf
Gnu Database Manager (GDBM) pdf
What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory pdf
Enabling Linux* Network Support of Hardware Multiqueue Devices pdf
Towards 10 Gbit NetFlow Monitoring Using Commodity Hardware pdf
High-Speed Passive Packet Capture and Filtering pdf
Evaluating the Performance of Network Protocol Processing on Multi-core Systems pdf
Modern Packet Capture and Analysis: Multi-Core, Multi-Gigabit, and Beyond pdf
Exploiting Commodity Multicore Systems for Network Traffic Analysis pdf

Amitava Biswas Home Page has usefull stuff html
Luca Deri's Home Page contains lots of valuable documents link


Programming with LibPcap -Sniffing the Network From Our own Application pdf
Tcpdump Filters pdf
The Sniffer's Guide to Raw Traffic html
Packet Reading with libpcap html
Programming with pcap html
Perl Compatible Regular Expression Library pdf
Application Layer Packet Classifier for Linux (l7-filter) html
ntop community page html

Enjoy and Help :)

Linus Celebrating Windows 7 Lauch ??

Linus Torvalds celebrating Windows 7 Launch :)

VMukti: cloud-based HD video communication platform

This is the most active VOIP project in SourceForge. This is  an open source P2P Web2.0 audio/video tele conference software for Asterisk/Yate.

VMukti is a video communications cloud-based platform that enables the convergence of voice, video and content over IP (VVoIP application platform) through a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) platform that supports the construction of a number of video and voice features (or to support pre-built features) in areas of Web conferencing, call-center operation, and distance education, etc. Currently this is a Microsoft Windows only product, since entire software is written in c#. Using Mono project it will be possible to run vMukti on Linux and other platforms.

Low cost Telephony on Open Hardware and Open Software

Telephony for Developing countries, this is the main attraction of Free Telephony Project, a open hardware, open source software project started by Dr. David Rowe an Australian engineer.

The main attraction of this is even the hardware design is open, so that anybody can manufacture and modify the products, the project's owners claims $100 per unit cost when manufactured in volume (atleast 1000 pieces). Currently ATCOM a chinese company is offering these products at a price of $400, which is relatively cheap compared to other commercial products.

ntop: Giga speed packet capture

Ntop is a open source projects aimed at Gigaspeed  packet capturing on commodity hardware.
Ntop is started by Luca Deri, a computer scientist at University of Pisa,

Ntop is based on TNAPI(Threaded NAPI) and PF_RING (new socket interface for efficient packet capture). The entire product is open source(GPLv2) and there are some commercial products based on this manufactured by a commercial spin off of ntop.org .

Where we stand on DPI?

Deep Packet Inspection tools are used mostly by ISPs. Corporates use this for IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems), censorship, QoS, etc.

Recently ipoque open sourced its DPI software source code to the public, they did mainly to avoid Privacy problems surrounding DPI Products, get it here.  This open sourced code is almost like wireshark, it  does simple protocol analysis just like any other open source protocol analyzers.  Ipoque open sourced only minimal code, code for encrypted data, analyzing algorithms are still closed source. Somebody tried openDPI on ubuntu.

Most of the DPI product vendors are making huge amount of money through this business, Procera's high end DPI product PL10000's cost is around $800, 000. These product are not made from custom ASICs, and if you are interested there is a paper on DPI on commodity hardware. Here is a simple white paper on DPI. Major vendors of DPI are cisco, juniper, ipoque, bivio, procera,  ipfabrics, arbor etc.

I can see a need to develop an open-source high quality DPI engine based on already existing open-source tools, and there is ample space to sell low cost DPI products based on commodity hardware. See LSI's Tarari range of Network content inspection processors.

Open Software on Open Hardware

I am not talking about openmoko, I am talking about tiny pieces of beautiful hardware modules called tridgets which you can club together to make different functional devices. This is not a toy building blocks (search bug labs in google image search), this will be future. Tridgets came from the term "Trivergence" which means:
a device could be at one place, its data at another, and its controls at a third seemed revolutionary and deserved a name – thus the term “Trivergence.” This definition came from Accenture's Andy Zimmerman last year, this year Accenture tied up with Bug Labs to give services (Accenture Mobility Operated Services) based on this. 

Sun Microsystems, Pitney Bowes, Orange, Antenna Software, and Human Rights Watch are customers or technological partners of this company. This company is a 2 year old startup from NewYork. Recently it raised $16 million through VC.

The thing which attracts me is the beauty of these devices, this is not just another openmoko (open hardware and open mobile stack), openmoko phones are not gorgeous.   Bug Lab opened all  the details of its product's hardware, find all  the specs(including schematics) here. All these devices runs on linux, Happy?

Now it is time to play with these tridgets. Check out "chumby" here .

Open Source Way out

You can try to avoid open source, but it’s probably easier to get out of the IT business altogether. By 2011, at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code, according to Gartner Research VP Mark Drive.This came from one of the leading IT research firm, let's understand these things in detail:

Factors which drive open source adoption.

Source code is open: Is this really important? This is of no use for end users, end user is only interested in the quality and reliability of product or services he/she uses. He will be interested in low cost software, So the question goes to whether open source create low cost software? yes I think,  it will create low cost software because open source code will create multiple support/service providers and developers (basic economics leads to low cost) to the system, for mutual benefits there is a possibility for contributing back to the main open source project. Open source also create possibility of enthusiastic and research (from academic and government institutions) contributors.

Competing Companies:  Biggest example is Google Microsoft war, Google is considering open source as a good weapon against microsoft. Google's main business is online Ads and services (webapps), for improving its business he needs platforms which permits it, for this Google is creating free and open platforms which will get mass adoption because of Google's fame. Open source tools from Google: Android mobile OS, Google wave, chrome, chrome OS etc are examples.

Non-Software Product Companies: Say Intel is supporting Linux is not a surprise, Intel is using moblin (Linux based netbook products) to market its Atom based processors.Since it is open source, ARM may also play a role in its development, ARM being a strong competitor in the netbooks market. Independent bodies like Linux Foundation plays a great role here to make sure that none of the development in Linux is tailored for any particular companies products, so this make sure that Linux will not end up like UNIX.

See Linux Foundation's report on major contributors in Linux kernel project.

   1. Red Hat: 12.3%
   2. IBM: 7.6%
   3. Novell: 7.6%
   4. Intel: 5.3%
   5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
   6. Oracle: 2.4%
   7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
   8. SGI 1.6%
   9. Parallels 1.3%
  10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%
  11. Academia: 1.2%
  12. Fujitsu: 1.1%
  13. MontaVista: 1.1%
  14. MIPS Technologies: 1.1%
  15. Analog Devices: 1.0%
  16. HP: 1.0%

Government and Academic Institutions: Government and Academic institutions are playing a major role in the development of open source, by adopting open standards and developing open source solutions. SELinux is developed by NSA. See Open Office implementations. See also apps for america e-governance. CDAC in india developed BOSS operating system supporting most of the Indian languages, thus enabling local computing.

Open Source Business Companies: RedHat, MonVista, Novell (SuSe), Trolltech(now Nokia) all these major companies depend on open source for their bread and butter. See Linux kernel contribution list Redhat (12.3%) and Novell ( 7.6%). These companies are very important because these are the companies which will ship the final commercial product to the customers, these companies fine tune open source solutions to make it commercial grade. On this process they will contribute back to the community, thus enhancing the quality of the open source product.

Personal Fame/Interest/Passion:  This is major factor in the development of open source projects, the Linux Foundation report says 18.2% of Linux is written by people who doesn't link to any company. People will contribute fine quality code to open source projects because of any of these Fame/Interest/Passion.