I'm nowadays attending the 23rd Open Grid Forum in Barcelona, which is one the largest Grid computing events on the calendar. This year there has been quite a stir caused by the rise of cloud computing services such as Amazon Web services which are seen as a competitor to Grids, such as OSG or EGEE.Today at the keynote by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, he presented the cogent business logic which underlines Cloud computing, and why he thinks Amazon AWS has been so successful. Amazon AWS allows anyone from little startups (e.g. animoto ) to large scale companies (e.g. Salesforce) to get access to cheap, reliable, fault tolerant and scalable computing infrastructure. Had these companies thought of doing their computing locally, they would have probably spent 80% of their resources on setting up and running the computing infrastructure which would be an undifferentiated service because anyone who wants to do large scale computing has to setup and run the computing infrastructure. The infrastructure costs money and doesn't make any money for the organization, what does make money for the organization is the 20% business logic the company uses its computing infrastructure for, so with Cloud computing companies can get rid of the 70-80% effort on a largely undifferentiating services and focus on the tasks which would eventually make them money! This has been increasingly realized by all quarters of the industry and hence we see major companies jumping on the bandwagon: Microsoft's Live Mesh, Google's App Engine, IBM and SAP's effort with the EU on Reservoir etc.). So from a layman's perspective it does look like Cloud computing is here to stay.But what about Grid Computing? Grid Computing is analogous to cloud computing but with marked differences: Grids are application specific! EGEE Grid infrastructure is designed to run e-Science applications largely anything from particle collision analysis to neuro-image analysis for Alzheimers. Grids impose application development models: High Energy Physics Grids (such as LCG, EGEE, parts of OSG) are mostly designed to work with Grid applications which are a pipeline of tasks, these Grids schedule and map these tasks onto distributed resources and make the results available to the users. Whereas other Grids like (like made with Globus 4.0, OMII, Taverna based etc.) are service Grids. These Grids assume that Grid applications consist of services instead of tasks. Now we have discussed the major division in modern Grid computing: task based vs. service based. There are other paradigms as well, which are variants of each.Cloud Computing does not impose any such restriction: They provide the infrastructure as a black box and it is up to the user how he wants to use it, if he desires he can virtualize an entire Globus Grid on it, at the same time, he may also setup a gLite Grid and work with tasks or he may not use either and just setup a cluster for MPI applications. Hence we can see that Clous definitely have an edge here.But having said all this, I do believe the Cloud computing and Grid computing will happily co-exist in the future. The infrastructure which Cloud computers will use will be Grids themselves, which will not schedule applications rather they will schedule virtual machines which encapsulate the user's application. But what happens if an application consisting of two virtual machines ends up being scheduling with both VMs in different sites or subnets? These issues and others will be tackled by a recent project which also has been covered extensively in this OGF and I will cover it later.

Microsoft Surface is one cool technology, with lots and lots of potential uses. The following parody shows some in an hilarious way

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY]

[digg=http://digg.com/microsoft/MS_Expression_is_no_Dreamweaver_competitor]

I love using Dreamweaver, it's one of the few applications which I have installed in a virtual machine run on my notebook. Unfortunately there is no open source webdesign IDE which comes close to it. The strengths of Dreamweaver are obvious to me: Its not biased to any specific technology it has near complete support for all major server side scripting languages, code collapse, easy CSS layout visualization, great GUI form creator etc.

Expression has most of these things aswell, however it is a product which is biased towards Microsoft technologies, not just biased it doesn't support anything else. The interface is completely revamped (compared to Frontpage), however most of the functionality remains the same, to me Expression is like:

Expression = Frontpage - Frontage (Server) Extensions + ASP.NET 2.0 support + Office 2007 interface (not completely though, it doesn't have any of those new toolbars)

The Interface looks great,

Expression seems to have "Preview in Firefox" support

So will Expression take over Windows web development? No. A lot web development is not done in ASP.NET, have a look at these stats here, php has been running tens of millions of domains deployed in more than a million servers, I can't find up to date ASP.NET statistics, but last time I checked it was not even more than 100,000. So MS is leaving out a huge chunk of web professionals, and Expression is supposed to target Web design professionals? Some people have complained that Expression is a Windows only tool, and a lot of web developers use Mac! I don't think that this is a valid complaint anymore, virtualization has really taken off now, and it doesnt matter if an application is developed for a specific OS, because all can run it. I use openSuse 10.2 as my primary OS, however while in Linux I make use of Office 2007, Dreamweaver etc.

Microsoft has tried to improve Dreamweaver and Expression interoperability. Expression can directly work with DWT templates. Maybe Microsoft is pulling the same trick, Joel Spolsky, ones blogged about adapted by the Excel team to eliminate barriers of entry by allowing seamless interoperability between both leading web development IDEs.

So in conclusion, I can't see any Dreamweaver to Expression migrations any time in the future as nothing genuine is being offered, only those developers who had been using Frontpage (those drones of MS certified people who don't know any alternative technology) will upgrade because Expression is a replacement for Frontpage. However don't write Expression off yet! Microsoft's strategy for software product has always been for the long haul! Launch mediocre products, and then improve them over time until they beat the incumbent leader. Word was no match for WordPerfect, however with gradual improvements over time, WordPerfect is virtually unknown nowadays!

[digg=http://digg.com/microsoft/FUD_Research_shows_Vista_interface_slower_than_WindowsXP_and_MacOSX]

I came across this story running on MacWorld, claiming that the user interface in Vista is slower and hence a step back from Windows XP. Because of the latency the researchers say that Windows Vista interface is where Windows 98 was!

To quote from the article:

""Menu latency is the time it takes an operating system to display a menu,” said Pfeiffer. “In Windows, it’s not immediate. That’s not a speed or performance issue, but a design choice.”

The new UIF data put Windows Vista, and its Aero graphical interface, behind Windows XP, which had showed improvement over earlier Microsoft operating systems. Menu latency, Pfeiffer said, remains a major problem in Vista, which scored 20 percent slower than XP. “Windows XP was a major step forward from Windows 98, but Vista is back to where 98 was,” Pfeiffer said."

First I wondered, after having used Vista myself I found no discernable difference between either Windows XP or Vista operating system. I investigated in which workstations the tests were conducted, according to the full PDF report, the following systems were used:

The Dual 2.8Ghz Dell Dimension, I googled for it and came acroos this: The Dell Dimension 9150 a 2.8 Ghz Dual Core machine, according to the official Dell website at here, this is a Vista Capable machine, which according to here in the Dell website means: Can Boot the OS but without running any applications or game! (see this). So hardly a system which would run Windows Vista at its optimum speed.

The Dell XPS 3.2 Ghz Machine however, is an optimum Windows XP machine: With 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM (in standard configuration). I dont know about the Mac workstations so no comment about them.

So this hardly looks like a fair comparison, I would like to see a test where all operating systems are run on optimum performance.

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Apps_will_never_replace_Ms_Office]

At least for me! And with MS Office I mean any desktop office software ie. OpenOffice.org
Why do I say this? Precisely because I find Google Apps to be completely useless for me. I tried to compile an article on it to check its functionality, I find numerous problems:

• Docs is just like some formatting toolbar with a huge text box, and it is extremely dificult to navigate in lengthy documents, whereas desktop office software you can easily switch between pages, this limits productivity.
• I mostly write articles/papers which are peer reviewed by my friends who highlight and comment on portions of text. You can't do that in Google Apps, although you can add comments, but they are inserted inline to the text, which can be confusing. In MS Office comments, and changes are shown in a sidebar. I also see that footnotes are missing.
• Google Apps is slow compared to desktop software. There are numerous other web application such as Gliffy, which is a charting and diagramming software in Flex, which for me can replace MS Visio easily, and the response is good aswell.
• Because its webbased there are numerous distractions, one may get an instant message notification, a new mail, check a slashdot/reddit/digg out etc, and what happens when the internet when the internet is disconnected, or my google account gets hacked, Google Apps I believe will be a hot target for h/crackers.
• Google Docs is awful for formatting, like the one required for research publications. I tried formatting according to IEEE 2 column format, and it was hell!

Google Apps as it stands now is far from replacing anything. Its excellent for blog posts like this and short articles or 'to-do' lists, however its not a serious danger to any of the desktop office software, and they are to remain for a loooong time.

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Top_5_reasons_not_to_get_Vista_just_yet]
I've been testing Windows Vista Ultimate for a week now, and now I think I've just had enough and I'm removing it from my PC, it has not made me switch from my OpenSUSE 10.2 Linux installation, and I use Windows XP for some limited work, related to a project. I believe in the next few months there is an opening for Linux to penetrate into mainstream computing, you can see the signs: Dell customers are demanding Linux, Mono Project maturing to the point where it is becoming increasingly possible to port native windows applications to Linux, say C#.NET, VB.NET. Virtualization becoming increasingly more efficient and powerful, allowing the transparent integration of operating systems and blurring the lines of what can and run and what not!

So back to Vista, what were my experiences from a week of testing: Excellent Graphics and UI, but weak everywhere else!

So these are my reasons why the World is not yet ready for Vista

1. You require new hardware and 2: No geniune innovation: This is a major sticking point for me. I don't want to get a new hardware for an OS that doesn't allow me to do anything which my current OS don't allow me to. In All the 4 days of Vista testing, I have not seen anything that is a geniune innovation and makes me crave for it! No, the post here, the blogger identifies some things which Vista can do and Windows XP can't:

"Can I change the volume on a per-application basis in Windows XP? Do I have integrated system-wide search in Windows XP? Can I set the language on a per-user basis in Windows XP? Does Windows XP have per-file emails and contacts?"

First of all the first thing he highlights, is a completely redundant feature: Why would I want to set multiple volume for specific applications, given that I'm listening to only one at any one time! The Integrated System Search in Windows Vista, is better than the pathetic search in Windows XP, however it still doesnt beat Google Desktop Search for me! Again, I assume that you speak only one language or your family members or co-workers do the same, so I can hardly think of a scenario where people speaking different languages share the same computer, or how often does that occur?

The hardware support in Windows Vista is pathetic! When Windows XP came out, it supported all major hardware of its time. However Windows Vista doesn't. I tested on a PC with the Intel D865GBF Motherboard, and it didn't detect any hardware in it, neither are audio drivers for the said platform available for Windows Vista.

3: Not enough applications, in a recent talk, Bill Gates said "The strength of the windows platform comes from the ecosystem around it". And that is the exact reason for Windows dominance in the Desktop. Microsoft has provided EXCELLENT development environment in terms of the Visual Studio, and APIs to facilitate development of all sorts of application. Millions of ISVs around the world are busy churning out Windows specific software. The title of this blog post is "Top 5 Reasons one should NOT get Vista, just yet!". "Just yet", because right now there are very few application which take advantage of the .NET 3.0 framework, or any of Vistas GUI features. Eventually they will, once we start seeing those applications then the adoption of Vista may rise, but we are not there yet! Also, there are very few games which take advantage of DirectX X, again once those games start appearing then Windows Vista may appeal to gamers.

The application which Windows Vista ships with it, are pathetic! For example look at MS Paint, couldn't they replace it with Paint.NET.

4: Security: Although security in Vista is considerably better, however I still don't want to rely on MS security tools, and tried installing third party security tools, and guess what: Vista won't let me install them. I really love, Sygate Professional, it is one of the best firewalls I've ever come across, however in Vista it seems to be blocked or something for "known compatibility issues".

5: DRM: Enough said about it in a lot of places elsewhere, I don't think I need to go over it again

So in conclusion: If you absolutely have to get Windows, don't get Windows Vista just yet, wait for the applications ie. The geniune innovation, if they are appealing enough then make the switch.

I've been a long time Linux user, recently someone asked me what were the advantages of Linux compared to Windows Vista, to be honest I didn't know the answer primarily because I had never used Windows Vista. And online sources such as Slashdot.org are unreliable when it comes to Linux vs. Windows debate, as they are biased towards Linux.

So I bought myself a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and setup a machine with it. In the coming days I will post my experiences with Windows Vista and will be in a better position to objectively answer the advantages of Windows Vista compared to Linux.

My initial experiences in installing Windows Vista have been pretty good. Windows Vista has the simplest installer of any Windows version. However, its not the simplest installer I've ever seen. The Installer of OpenSUSE 10.2 most notably stands out. I especially like the way the OpenSUSE 10.2 installer makes decisions on your behalf, like partitioning schemes etc. Where-as partitioning and disk selection is still manual in Windows Vista.

Once Vista completed installing, I was not at all amazed by the eye candy. The transition in user interface design from Windows XP to Windows 9x was huge, and less so with Windows XP to Windows Vista. Infact there are softwares which change the look and feel og Windows XP to that of Windows Vista.

There was much ado about the resource requirements of Windows Vista, and how it will force people to upgrade their hardware. I'm running Windows Vista on a Pentium 2.8 Ghz HT, 80 GB SATA, 512MB+256MB RAM, and a Radeon 9600 (which is now considered legacy), and I'm getting smooth performance. However a true picture of performance requirements will emerge once some software is installed in it.

Vista looks 'visibly' more secure. That is there are popups asking you that some certain application is about to execute, there are popups for messages from applications. Sometimes it can be annoying thats why I may disable User Account Control. I've disabled the standard Windows Firewall, and tried installing Sygate Professional, one of my favorite firewall for Windows, however due to compatability problems it wont install.

The start menu has been redesigned, and to be honest, I think the Windows XP one was better. Recently a new design of the 'K Menu was added to OpenSuse 10.2, and I like the way its structured and its really easy to access applications, however in the Windows Vista menu, its not easy because all applications are displayed as a single list. See the screenshots to see what I mean.

And Compare this to the OpenSUSE 10.2 menu

And while I was taking the first screenshot, I came across the first user interface bug, I have seen it being reported somewhere while Vista was till beta, but its still not fixed in the final release. As you can see when I go about saving the image and click on the drop down button instead of seeing a hiearchical list of the file system, I see a list of recent websites visited!

So my verdict about Vista in the first day is, that its not a definite improvement over previous Windows versions, most notable Windows XP, and surely not against other Operating Systems. Upto now I have not seen anything that is a geniune innovation. Microsoft trumpeted a lot about translucent windows and security in their add campaign, sure security is better now, but they can not claim it to be the 'most secure system ever', and translucent windows have been in MacOSX for years.

I finally decided to take the plunge and remove Windows XP completely from my notebook (so far I was dual-booting), however I require certain applications which I need to use as part of my research that's why I have installed VMWare and hosted Windows XP on it, with the software. I'm so far very impressed by the performance, although I only have 512MB RAM, but it doesn't feel as if I'm running an emulated environment. VMWare allows me to stay in Linux and access those application which I require which are not available on Linux yet. Gradually I think virtualization will facilitate Linux in taking over the Desktop J.

However I have come across a problem which has been purely setup by open source "fundamentalists"! As soon as I installed VMWare I tried out various hardware including USB flash drives and USB camera, but they won't work? And upon investigation it was revealed that this was due to a method for accessing the USB port, which was claimed to be insecure, hence support for it was discontinued in openSUSE 10.2, in a heated discussion in the forums, it was very clear who was behind all this, a respected kernel hacker. Greg KH recently jumped the canon and was the one who posted a patch to the LKML, for eliminating binary drivers. I respect him; however he does not seem to have any for users. In a post he said:

"We are not supporting VMWare, because it is closed source and proprietary"

It indeed is, but is there any other open source solution that beats it? Xen requires kernel modification and hence does not work with Windows, the only solution to virtualize windows on Linux computer right now (KVM may change that in future, however it is in the initial stages of development, and runs only on the latest processors) is to use VMWare. In effect VMware is doing us a favour by porting VMWare to Linux at all! I'm 100% certain that the openSuse 10.2 kernel team is doing the right thing by closing a potential exploitable thing, however the approach they have adopted is completely unacceptable! If the concerned methods is indeed exploitable, it is only in the application developers own interest to adopt a more secure method for accessing USB ports, however why can't all Linux distributions follow the same standard then? I can well imagine why VMWare didn't use the openSuse method of 'securely' accessing USB ports, because it would conflict with other popular distributions and if they try to support each method, would result in excessive workload to the company. The best method in this case would be to use something like the OSDL (what's the job of OSDL anyway?) to provide recommendations to the linux distributions in order to standardize kernel level interfaces, so that application developers do not end up supporting dozens of methods for a trivial task as accessing a USB port.

For the time being while Windows runs on more than 90% of the worlds desktops, and is a lucrative market for Independent Software Vendors, we can not ignore users who have applications which are Windows dependant; there are 1,000 times more such applications than Linux dependant apps. And the only way to allows users to run those applications on Linux for the time being is to use virtualization (WINE in my opinion, is progressing nicely, but still has some way to go).

PS. Instead of just ranting here, I will be releasing an openSUSE default kernel with the USB access feature turned on, so that people who need it now can use it

I have years of experience in Linux, and have used countless distributions in the past. Slackware has been my all time favorite. Over the years I have finetuned it for my PCs that they exhibit performance which I could never dream of in Windows. The thing I really love about Slackware is that because it is raw, the amount you learn about GNU/Linux is enormous. So In desktops at least in my place Slackware rules. However I would not say that Slackware is for the Desktop, it is a raw distro, which requires a lot of expertise and time to fine-tune and get everything working. I initially used to pitch it to newbies, but they always ended up being disgusted with linux due to the amount configuration they had to do.

Recently I got myself a Dell Inspiron 6400 Notebook, and installing Slackware on it, was pleasant at first, but than soon I realized many things where not working, after extensive configuration messing with the xorg.conf, countless kernel recompilations and others I got everything to work and enjoyed Slackware on my Laptop.

Today, I thought for a change I'll try out OpenSuSe 10.1 from Novell out. And it has been a blast! From the first glimpses of the installer I said to myself "hmm.. 32 bit!" (slackware has DOS-like installer, I know its not the only one with a 32bit installer, I've used Redhat's anaconda, its good, but the SuSe one is impressive). Soon I was in for surprises, everything went well during the installation: At first my external mouse and the touchpad automagically worked! Even the scroll wheel did . Then as the installation proceeded, my sound card got detected (with which I had problems in Slackware, although I had compileed SND_HD_INTEL into the kernel, it still wouldnt work) , the graphics card (glxgears shows close to 900, thats 800 more than Slackware default ), along with the appropriate resolution (1280x800). Bluetooth, WiFi, firewire, everything was picked up by the installer automatically. This is how I expect a Linux installaton to be! SuSe really sets the standard here.

In Slackware, we have the very raw pkgtools package management system, which is simple and easy. But sometimes one runs into version conflicts, just as in Federo with "RPM-Hell". SuSe has perhaps one of the best package management system built into YaST. It handles dependencies transparently, and downloads and installs them without any special intervention.

So OpenSuSe is here to stay in my laptop! I know there are some political arguements against Novell for having struck a deal with Microsoft, and some are going as far as proposing a boycott of all Novell code. But the fact is Novell has made SuSe an extremely user-friendly distribution which really rocks on laptops! I'm sure it has the same performance on Desktops. So with OpenSuse and some other distros like Ubuntu etc. Linux is finally ready to enter mainstream desktop computing.

Java introduced the notion of Browser based applications, in the form of Java applets, which included nuances of feature rich desktop applications within a browser! It was a huge success and widely popular during the dot com bubble, but now I rarely hear about new nifty applets? Web Start gained some traction but the furor over it has died down. Rather another technology has taken the reigns now: AJAX, asynchronous Javascript and "XML". AJAX is the marriage of server side scripting languages such as perl or php and client side scripting language such as Javascript perhaps a little flash, imbued into HTML and some little XML or some other mechanism to transfer information, we get a powerful framework to create desktop-like applications on the browser! AJAX has taken computing by storm. The wave of AJAX based startups, acquisitions and mergers has already begun! Are we heading towards another bubble or is this one for real?

AJAX applications are a definite improvement over previous flickering page based applications, and what more, these applications are NOT memory savvy as Java applets used to be, and no runtime environment is required to run such applications, just a compatible, updated browser is enough. Nowadays many more innovative AJAX applications are being built than Java applets, and people are accepting AJAX more readily than ever. This year for the first time I heard people doing AJAX based undergraduate degree projects in Pakistan, there is talk in my research lab of developing AJAX based intefaces to some of the distributed applications developed here. Not long ago, browser based application used to be the exclusive domain of Flash and Java Applets.

So what was wrong with Applets? I don't need to list any reasons, you can check out this poll which was conducted in Java.net, the official Java forums, and complaints ranged from: Too hard to deploy to to slow in loading!

So we can safely say that AJAX has killed Java applets, a significant portion of standard Java.

From Google Trends we can see how much interest people have in the three technologies, Java Applets, Webstart and AJAX, and compare the news reference volume certainly AJAX has ruled the headlines in recent months and years.

As wireless connectivity expands and gets increasingly cheaper, more and more mobile devices will get connected, once this happens the future of J2ME would look bleak. I personally have started using AJAX based services like Airset.com, which provides an intuitive calendar solution that helps you also to remain in touch with your friends and family. The built- in calendar program which came with the PDA, was developed in J2ME and it lacked a lot functionality, and I found it a bit clunky to use. Another drawback of J2ME applications which you won't find in AJAX applications is the mutual incompatibilities between mobile devices. Like I can purchase a game from the internet designed for Symbian mobiles, but when I try to run it in a cellphone using symbian it won't run! After a little bit of investigation it turns out that the game supports Nokia symbian mobiles, and some certain sets NOT Motorola ones, like wise try running a J2ME game for the Motorola E680i on a Nokia N92 it wont work!

The greatest impediment to AJAX of course is the lack of connectivity, once connectivity is seamless and universal, than people will stop using native applications like the one developed in J2ME and start using AJAX ones.

One complaint I have about AJAX services is that many of them run poorly on cellphone/PDAs, this is certainly not a problem with AJAX itself, because services such as Gmail and Airset.com, prove that AJAX can run on supported browsers on mobile devices if the service is well developed.