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New OS from Google – Google Chrome OS »

The web is the platform! Google is introducing a new OS based on the Linux kernel, primarily “designed for the web”. And you are wrong, if you think that we are talking about Android here.

Google is launching a new OS, called Google Chrome OS and this is not targeted at the mobile market. Well, we all know that Google is pretty obsessed in moving our applications to the web. And what else could be a better way than building an OS, that is specifically designed for the web?

Google Chrome OS, from ground up, is built to be secure and fast. Aren’t there times where checking for new emails is quicker and easier on a mobile phone than booting up your laptop? Well, that’s what Google seems to be addressing with Google Chrome OS. It wants to keep the OS lightweighted, so that the boot process does not take too much time.

Before you start wondering on where to download, note that it is not yet PC ready. Google plans to open source the OS later in this year and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Well…I do like this development. I am sure I will set up a boot loader, which will boot the Google Chrome OS as the default option. This will make all web based things easy and quick to load. If I really want to load Windows, I could do that too, but it would then be as often as I go to the BIOS…only when I really need to go there!

Sending data between JavaScript and PHP using CodeIgniter, jQuery and JSON »

I am sure you would have had many situations, where you had to pass large amounts of data from PHP to JavaScript. This is a very common need, especially when you are using Ajax. I have seen code where developers would send a comma separated string and parse it out in JavaScript. While it works, the code looks ugly and you can run into many issues if the data you are passing uses the delimiter (comma). A more cleaner approach, of course, is to send data through XML. But parsing XML on the client side might be an overkill for mundane tasks. A quick, clean and simpler approach is to pass data in JSON format.

If you wonder what JSON is, here is what the JSON website says, “JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate.“.

The bottom line is that it is easy for ever one!

Making an Ajax request:
jQuery comes with JSON support and even lets you use it with Ajax calls. Let us say, you have an onblur event which makes an Ajax call to get data for the rest of the fields, you would do the following in your onblur event:

url = “http://www.domain.com/mycontroller/” + isbn;
$.getJSON(url, function(json){
document.book_form.publisher.value = json.publisher;
});

For those of you, who have used jQuery before, the above code looks plausible. For the rest, the above function is making an Ajax call to the URL and the second argument, function(json) is a callback function, that gets kicked off when the browser receives the response.

JSON can pack multi dimensional arrays too; the above example is just returning a row of data back to the client.

Progressive Download vs Streaming »

When delivering video on the web, you probably would have wondered whether to use a streaming server or not. There are quite a few articles on the web and they are very useful. I just wanted to summarize my experience on this here.

Progressive Download: This is a better solution when your clips are small, say less than 15 seconds. Users would not experience any delay, when the clips are small. In fact, the good thing (or the bad thing) about progressive downloads is that the media completely gets downloaded onto the user’s machine. This makes it play seamlessly even when there are minor network hiccups. Also, contrary to popular belief, progressive downloads does not mean that users have to wait until the complete file is downloaded. These days, all media players, are smarter. They can start playing the video, when they have buffered more than 3-5 seconds. The major drawback with Progressive Downloads is that files are stored locally on the user’s machine and they can re-distribute it, if they wish to do so.

Streaming Video: This is a good solution, when the files are large. In order to stream a video well, you first need to understand the bitrate you would like to encode the video. If you encode a video, say at 1.2Mbps, and if your users have 512kbps, the video would not play seamlessly. Not only that, when there are network hiccups, there are chances that certain frames of the video are skipped. This is very annoying, when you want to provide a high quality video to your users. Of course, you always have the option of encoding at different settings, low, medium and high. Another issue is that setting up streaming servers are expensive. There are quite a few open source streaming servers for flash, like Red5, lighthttpd and nginx. But most likely, you would have to manually set these up. On the Windows platform, Windows Enterprise Edition comes with a streaming server, so it is relatively easy, though hosting providers usually charge little extra for Windows Enterprise Edition.

If you want an example of both, check out http://www.tsebs.info for Progressive Download. For Streaming, try http://www.ivirtual.in/why-ivirtual.html. Both use Windows Media Player. So, I suggest that you test them on IE7+ on Windows. It will also work on Firefox on Windows. It is little painful to get the links working on Mac.

Check out iVirtual at Silicon India Start Up Event on June 6th 2009 »

Please do stop by at the iVirtual Stall on June 6th, 2009 at the Silicon India Start Up Event. iVirtual is getting good response from Engineering college principals at Vizag.

To know more about iVirtual, click here.

iVirtual is going live on June 3rd, 2009 »

iVirtual is getting launched on 3rd, June 2009. With internet connections getting speedier and speedier every few months, video based solutions will be more prevalent. iVirtual is the Indian version of the American product, VIP Advantage. iVirtual is a video based, virtual interview program that hopes to transform the way Employers, Recruiters and Job Seekers interact.

iVirtual uses Windows Media Services and is built on Microsoft technologies. Check out iVirtual at http://www.ivirtual.in.

iVirtual is a Unosoft Technologies product.

Online advertisement revenue is not directly proportional to website traffic »

There is a myth amongst bloggers and other website owners that the more traffic they generate, the more ad revenue they make. 5 years back, probably, it was believable. But if we look at some of the heavy weights, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, none of them are profitable yet. While Twitter and Facebook are on one side, YouTube is pretty interesting. It has lot more overhead when compared to the other two. We have a first hand experience maintaining a high volume video site (check out http://www.thescoutingedge.com). If the pain of encoding a 90 minute game into 150+ high res and low res clips is on one side, the infrastructure needed (download servers, application servers, backups etc) is really daunting. If Google did not buy YouTube, I wonder how the original owners could have ever supported this beast.
As per Credit Suisse Report, YouTube could lose upto $470 million in 2009. That is a lot of money, for any company in this economy. The point being that inspite of being an online leader in video, why is it not being profitable? There are tons and tons of people visiting the site every day, so logically, there should be lot of revenue through Ads alone. See the MSNBC video below discussing why advertisers shy away from sites like YouTube and why premium content is important for Ad revenue generation.

The most secure OS on the planet »

Microsoft COO, Kevin Turner thinks that Microsoft Vista, post SP2, is the most secure OS on the planet. I am not sure of the name of the planet he is referring to, but Vista does not mean much to me. Then why, you wonder, I picked up this news for my blog?

Interestingly, that statement reminded me of two things:
1. An old Apple’s Get a Mac Ad – (It needs quicktime).
2. Charlie Anna’s statement in Roadside Romeo – I am so dangerous that sometimes, I get scared of myself.

Anyway, security is good and if they believe that Vista is the safest product they ever launched, thats even better. They are trying their best, whether you and I use it or not.