Rake needs to write...

Except the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
'T is lost, and lost to me.

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At centre of the sea,

And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shores
Before the harbor lie.

I've been in flux for the longest time..mostly physical flux...been hopping between countries for a while now for both personal and work reasons. Ended up in Toronto and I think I will be here for a couple of months at the very least. It's been 6 months since I was last here and now I have seen Toronto in all it's avatars - the gloomy gray winter avatar, the fall and now the summer - or the start of one. The weather has been just perfect the last couple of weekends and I have been soaking it in. Nothing spectacular but I am just getting started.

I took in the Toronto Islands Dragon Boat Festival yesterday though I spent more time looking for a hot dog vendor on the island than cheering the hard-working boat crews.

Sometimes what is captured in two dimensions forces you to stand in the room with people who are going through an incredible experience - sad, happy, poignant, brave, resigned....I felt the soul sapping sorrow, love, pain and happiness in these pictures. I had to share this...

http://www.sacbee.com/static/newsroom/swf/april07/mother/

Founders at Work

I have been trying to find 'Founders at Work: Stories of Starups' Early Days' on and off for the last year or so. Did I mention I live in Bangkok, Thailand? I am kicking myself for forgetting to look it up when I was in Toronto for a couple of months. Curses...

I was looking it up on Google again today and came across Guy Kawasaki's post on the same book. I liked this one from one of the anecdotes in the book that Guy had in the post:

Tim Brady (Yahoo!). “The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in May of ‘95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We were laughing, ‘How many pages to the gallon today?’”

hehe...that's funny..

I was scanning through my Google Reader Link Blog and noticed the number of new applications being implemented in Flex/Flash.

Flash/Flex is getting some well known names in it's corner. I am very impressed with the way Adobe has targeted and honed the direction of the Flex/Flash platform after it adopted Macromedia. The Apollo platform that will soon come out is another crucial step in that direction. What direction is that? Flash is no more seen as the delivery tool of the infamous banner ads. It is now perceived as a serious platform for Rich Applications used by the big boys of the internet and increasingly, even in the enterprise.

The two latest examples of companies waking up to the power and potential of Flex/Flash are Google and Trillian.

Google made available the Google Talk Gadget a couple of days back which is a Flash implementation of Google Talk that can be added onto your Google Personalized Homepage. The gadget can be even be added to a blog or webpage so visitors can chat with you right there in the context of your blog. Best of all, I noticed that it has the "Call" button - so you can VoIP with your google talk contacts right there - no need for the desktop client! I chatted up a couple of friends and was pretty impressed with the implementation.

Though I haven't tried this out, the Google Talk blog also mentioned:

"We worked hard to make the Google Talk Gadget embody the same simple, clean feel of Gmail Chat and the Talk download client--but we threw in some extra goodies too. You'll notice that your conversations all open up in tabs inside the Gadget. And one of the coolest features in the Google Talk Gadget is the ability to do media previews. When we're not busy working on new features for Talk, we're checking out "Ask A Ninja" on YouTube or Friday night's party photos on Picasa Web Albums, sending around links to this multimedia in our chats, and posting them in our status messages. It was just plain silly that our IM client didn't know more about photos and videos other than the fact that it was a link. So by scratching our itch, we can now watch YouTube videos and see Picasa Web Albums photos inside of the Google Talk Gadget anytime someone IMs us a link or sets it as their status message. "

Does this mean we are going to see Google employing Flash more and more in their upcoming "betas"?

About a week back, I came across Astra, a version of Trillian's popular IM client that is implemented in Flash - for the desktop (it will also have a web client also -also, of course implemented in Flash). And they are quick to point out they are not using Apollo but rather, an internally developed technology they have termed "OS Layer".

More over at the Trillian blog

Another web app that I am really interested in seeing how it turns out is Virtual Ubiquity that is coming out with what they like to call "the first real word processor for the web". I believe it's written in Flex 2 for Flash 9. Their screenshots look great but I really want to have a go at it myself before passing a verdict.

Robert Scoble had a few good things to say about a demo of VU he sat in on a while back -I usually agree with his point of view but he sometimes gets a little too excited about shiny new things - an ailment I am guilty of too.

What I am really curious about is how VU is going to support fonts and font rendering. Given my past experience with Flash, it's hopeless at Font management and just doesn't have the wires for it. I haven't played around too much with Actionscript 3/Flex 2/Flash 9 but I hope they have defined their Font Management capabilities a little better - better APIs, better documentation...I want to take a look at this when I get a little time soon. Anyway this aspect of an online Word processor intrigues me greatly along with a couple of others like support for clipboard operations like copy-paste of formatted content containing images, tables etc...This ultimately will make or break a web-based Word processor in my humble opinion - operations that make desktop applications so powerful.

I *know* they can be done - question is has VU taken the pain to do it?

All in all, happy and exciting days for Adobe. Speaking of whom, -and given the context of this post, I should mention the online version of Adobe Photoshop that Adobe is planning to launch in about 6 months. It will be free and ad-supported - and it will be the best possible advertisement for the Flash/Flex platform's power. As a developer, there is nothing that screams out a platform's strength than a complex image processing software implemented in it! Of course, we have to wait and see how many of the desktop version's features are "descoped" in the online version - I didn't get an inkling many would be but we'll see.

Adobe of course very recently launched a hosted video editing tool, Remix that it will be available as part of the tools available on Photobucket.

I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing more and more of Flash based RIAs delivered either in the web browser or in an Apollo like delivery model in the next year or two. I itch to articulate my p.o.v. on the Flash vs. Ajax pseudo-debate that's been on for the last couple of years but that's a whole new post.

I am perhaps a little biased towards Flash/Flex because I was heavily involved in designing and guiding Osellus's Flash-based interface for it's IRIS process Automation system. Osellus I dare say was one of the first "serious" companies to recognize the potential of Flash and employ it as part of its enterprise-class product. That's right! IRIS is an enterprise product currently being used by very qualified process teams in very large organizations - and it's primary authoring interface is implemented in Flash!!

I am keen to know which other enterprise level products have Flash based interfaces or atleast components. If you know of any, let me know!

Pointed but deserved...
http://images.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple-getamac-security_480x376.mov

Ever wondered why and how your normally demure and shy colleague morphs into the uber-monger of rumors and snitches when you happen to instant message her one night?

The New York Times tries to explain here.

KIA: Thanks for reminding me I am slacking off :). I'm trying, I'm trying.

Things that bother me:

• Otherwise intelligent, educated persons revering a man/woman as god and as a consequence, sycophantically championing anything the said pseudo-god says and does.
  
• India's media hyped growth story:
  Typical news bites these days - 9% year-on-year growth...massive FDI..."sustained" growth...huge surplus Forex...country oozing tech whizzes by the bushel....not un-true and yet these are like false echos in a hollow cave. There are a million problems but here is the biggest - incompetence and focus on the wrong issues.
  Here is one statistic that says everything - India's economy hit 4 trillion $ last year - more than double that of the whole of Africa - and yet, 46% of her children under 3 years are malnourished.
  
• The sense of lethargy that hangs over me like a cloud these days.
  
• Thoughtless, uninformed judgments passed on cultures, religions and countries

This is my link blog which basically is the feed posts I have shared on google reader which is my reader of choice:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/08235842837105824062

This is the feed link in case you want to subscribe.