Back in 2004, when I discovered blogs, blogging was received with cautious optimism among most academic circles as far as I know. But over the past year or two, more and more people in academia have started to blog. Probably a sign that blogs are being taken seriously as a means of disseminating information, as a vehicle for sharing ideas and gathering feedback, and also, as a valuable tool for brand building and maintenance.
This post was triggered by the fact that my advisor, Prof. Amin Vahdat, is also blogging now! Let me take this opportunity to highlight some academic blogs that I know of.
As is evident from the image below, something about my last post clearly struck a chord with a lot of people.
Traffic spike
I don’t know if it was “vim” or it was “sexy”, but somehow this post landed up on Reddit. This is the closest I’ve come to being slashdotted — for that one day, Reddit drove nearly 95% of the traffic to my site. Also, before you start jumping to conclusions from the graph above, let me put some numbers out there. On average, my site gets anywhere between 200 to 400 visitors daily. On April 18th, my site got 7000+ visitors, an order of magnitude more than I normally get. That is the spike you see, and now the traffic is back to normal, thank you very much.
Since a lot of people seem to be interested in Vim hopefully, I want to discuss the space of text editors (in particular, editors for programming) and where I think we are headed.
The first observation is that both of the giants on the editing world — Vim and Emacs — are ancient by any standards. Depending o how you look at it, I think it is fair to say that neither editor has evolved significantly in terms of the underlying code, architecture and usage model in the past two decades, if not more.
The second observation is that despite the large number of editors out there, IMHO few have any significant mind and market share other than Vim and Emacs. Obviously there is Eclipse, Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.
And so I wonder, what would the text editor landscape look 5-10 years down the line? There are many who would say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I’m a big believer in change, and I think over time, change is inevitable. However, at this point I don’t know what, if any, substantial change is happening in the text-editor arena. No new editors with fundamentally new ways of manipulating text or amazingly compelling features are emerging. I actually don’t mind reinventions of the wheel either, as long as the reinvention delivers a much better wheel. For instance, the Vim source code is not the most modular, extensible or maintainable. And it is in C — not that there is anything wrong with it, but I think an object oriented language is better for a complex piece of software like Vim.
The only recent buzz has been about Textmate and the many clones it has since inspired. I’m really looking forward to Yzis reach a usable milestone. What are other promising editors out there that you are excited about?
Here are some web service I wouldn’t mind paying for, simply because of the value they add to my day-to-day life. Note that some of them already have paid plans, it is just that I haven’t reached a stage where I actually need to upgrade. All I’m saying is that these websites have enough real value add for me to be worth for real money.
Having all my financial data pulled in a single place is fantastic. Previously, I used to have to go and log into 5 different websites to check on all my bank accounts and credit cards. Add to that the ability to examine spending trends, watch your investment grow (or crash, as is the case with the current economy) over time, alerts for fee, low balance and over-budgets etc, and you’ve got a killer service in your hands. Of course, Mint is not without its problems, but the benefits far outweigh the snags.
Passpack has been a real time saver for me. I have written about web based password managers before, and so far Passpack has been just fantastic! I just wish they would bring back search-as-you-type…
I’m a big believer in using the right tools you help you work smarter. RTM is a great way to offload your todo list from your brain. It has all the key elements of a good web service good — a great UI, keyboard shortcuts, the ability to email tasks, integration with services like IMified, a nice API (so you can use desktop apps such as Gnome DO or Quicksilver to interact with RTM without ever leaving your desktop).
Stanford is undoubtedly one of the top most engineering schools in the world. In my mind, a computer science curriculum at such top schools should do just that — teach computer science. Courses that cover computer architecture, software design, operating systems, networking, graphics, theory, databases, algorithms etc all make sense to me. But a course to teach students how to use the API on a commercial SDK? I think other organizations (vocational institutes, community colleges etc) are better suited for such courses. What is so great about such courses being taught at Stanford or MIT or Berkeley? I personally think those resources could be used better elsewhere.
It seems this is part of a larger trend. More and more schools are designing courses that are aligned with the hot buzz-words in the industry, perhaps in order to attract applications. For instance, you can learn how to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails (RoR) at Berkeley. Stanford has another class on building Facebook applications.
I would much rather see a class on say “building scalable web services” and have Facebook, Twitter as case studies in the class.
I have been using Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) for my floatingsun.net email for a while now (earlier I was using the email setup at my hosting provider, but moved away because of the lack of adequate spam filtering). In the beginning, it was just a joy and everything was nice and peachy.
However, over time, the service has been gradually deteriorating. Since the past few weeks I have noticed a significant increase in latency. Meaning that if I open mail.google.com side-by-side with mail.google.com/a/floatingsun.net, my “regular” gmail account loads up much, much faster than my floatingsun.net account. This despite the fact that my regular gmail account has at least 100x the messages on my floatingsun.net account. And in fact, there have been several occassions in the recent past where it doesn’t load at all, or fails with a server error.
Not to mention that IMAP access has been horrendous recently. Throughout the day, email takes forever to open in my IMAP client (it opens up relatively faster on the web interface) and I get frequent disconnections from the server.
I don’t mean to beat up on Google. I must admit that I am on the free plan, so I really have no reason to complain. But gmail is also free. I have a feeling Google is deliberately imposing some kind of quality-of-service differentiation between paid Google Apps accounts vs free ones. I am keeping an eye on the status dashboard — it says no issues but my IMAP is still flaky. Is anyone else seeing poor performance on free GAFYD accounts?
