Category: Uncategorized

Looking glass: search keywords


I’ve been meaning to post some analysis data on the traffic that drives my site for a while now but never get around to it. This is first in a series of posts which looks at what people have been reading on my site, what works and what doesn’t. This data has been gleaned from [[http://analytics.google.com|Google Analytics]] with the following caveats:

* there was no monitoring for most of 2005–2006
* there is no data for at least half of 2006–2007

So really the only solid data set is from 2007–2008. Nevertheless, some data is better than no data so I’m looking at it anyways. Finally, I will also try to correlate this with the top keywords as reported by WordPress Stats and AWStats to see how well they match. Without further ado, here are the top ten searched keywords for the past three years:

^ Rank ^ 2005–2006 ^ 2006–2007 ^ 2007–2008 ^
| 1 | procastrination | airtel call home | quickstar |
| 2 | quickstart amway | airtel callhome | bww |
| 3 | apahran | airtel india call | airtel call home |
| 4 | riya | airtel call india | wordpress widgets |
| 5 | udai | amazon ec2 | __macosx |
| 6 | dell linux irda 8600 | wordpress widgets | reservation in higher education |
| 7 | fluxiom | udai | airtel india call |
| 8 | “web2.0 office”, | mapmyindia | udai |
| 9 | amway quickstart | mit sketching | airtel call india |
| 10 | cryptography | latex beamer | web based password manager |

Clearly [[http://floatingsun.net/2006/12/18/more-on-airtel-call-home/|my]] [[http://floatingsun.net/2006/12/18/airtel-call-home/|posts]] on Airtel’s [[http://airtelcallhome.com|Call Home]] service stole the show in 2006–2007. It remains a strong contender the next year as well. However, in 2007, almost everything else was completely drowned out by my [[http://floatingsun.net/2005/05/06/quickstartamwaybww/|Quixstar/BWW post]]. What I’m not showing here, however, is by //how much// do the ranks differ. Suffice to say that the number of hits on the Quixstar post far outnumbered the number of hits on everything else put together pretty much.

There don’t seem to be any surprises here either. I’m not sure if I should feel good or bad about it. The hope is that by taking stock of these keywords, I can get a better sense of exactly what is it that people come to this site for. Not that I’m writing for an “audience” per se, but there’s no harm in writing what people actually like to read :-) As I said before, I’ll try to follow up with some more stats soon.

Enough with Linux as a second class citizen!


I’m sick of Linux being treated like a second class citizen. Hardware and software vendors alike almost proudly display “Supported for PC and Mac” tag lines. Technically, that doesn’t even make sense, because both Windows and OS X can now run on pretty much the same hardware. And so can Linux. Even from a market share stand point, I can understand vendors’ desires to advertise out of the box Windows support, but the market share of OS X is not substantially greater than that of Linux (specially if you put together all the different distributions).

But most importantly, I think it just being mean to the open source community. Consider the recent [[http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/03/18safari.html|Safari announcement]]. Now it is well known that Safari is based on [[http://webkit.org/|WebKit]] which has its roots in [[http://konqueror.kde.org/features/browser.php|KHTML]], the HTML renderer originally developed by the [[http://kde.org|KDE community]]. To its credit, Apple has showed its interest in giving back to the community and [[http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unforking-of-kdes-khtml-and-webkit|WebKit and KHTML developers are collaborating]] to share their innovations.

But then why does Apple release Safari for Windows and Mac only? WebKit works fine on all platforms (both with GTK and QT) so there’s really no good reason. For that matter, what about iTunes? Why isn’t there an iTunes equivalent for Linux from Apple itself? Why does it want to alienate so many iPod and iPhone users who have Linux on their desktop? What about keyboards and wireless mice? Or monitors and hard drives and webcams and tablets and microphones? Or any number of the zillions of peripherals out there.

If you read the news, there is no dearth of evidence that open source in general, and Linux in particular, is impacting our daily lives more than ever before. Even if you don’t realize it. From embedded systems to mission critical systems, from enterprise systems to the OLPC, from news papers to television stations, Linux and open source are every where. For a comprehensive in-depth article and lots of numbers backing these claims, I highly recommend [[http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html|this article]] by David Wheeler. How long will we have to wait before vendors finally accept that this is a customer base that they can NOT afford to ignore? How long will the community will have to keep proving itself over and over again that it is NOT a bunch of nerdy hobbyists who have no connection with reality?

**Update**: Here are some more resources on Linux/open source usage:
* [[http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/|Linux in business]]: business by categories
* [[http://www.aaxnet.com/design/linux2.html|Companies using Linux]]
* [[http://www.desktoplinux.com/index.html|Lots of news about Linux on the desktop]]: several big vendors like Dell and Lenovo now sell laptops and desktops pre-installed with Linux

“Apping for Dummies” is back!


A long time back I wrote a then quite popular article called [[http://floatingsun.net/articles/apping-for-dummies|Apping for Dummies]], intended as a guide to those overwhelmed by the graduate application process, based on my experiences. For some time it was the most viewed content on my web site. Some where during the subsequent rewrites of the web site, unfortunately, I lost track of the article. It was [[http://floatingsun.net/data/articles/apping.html|still available]], but the formatting was all broken and it wasn’t linked from anywhere and so over time it lost all its Google juice and was lost in cyberspace.

Well, I have now resurrected it at [[http://floatingsun.net/articles/apping-for-dummies/|its new location]]. Most of the content remains unchanged, but hopefully it will now be more easily accessible and some people will still find it useful :-) As always, comments and feedback are much appreciated!

Apping for Dummies

UPDATE: My advisor, Amin Vahdat, has written an excellent blog post on this subject.

UPDATE: A much extended and updated version of this article has been converted into a small guide book which is now available for purchase from Pothi.com for Rs. 99 (excluding shipping). They take credit card payments and shipping is available anywhere within India as well as to UK, USA and Canada.

I am also making the book available in its entirely for FREE below. Hope it is helpful to some of you out there. If you find the book useful, I would appreciate if you could drop me a line :)

Note to prospective applicants to UCSD or elsewhere

Come fall, I inevitably receive emails from numerous people enquiring about admissions at UCSD. I have tried to put in all the information I have in this document and the UCSD Grad Student FAQ. Please go through these documents carefully before sending me an email. In particular, do not send me email asking the following:

  • These are my credentials. Can you tell me what chance do I have of getting admitted to UCSD: I can’t. And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t. So please, don’t ask.
  • What should I do in this XYZ situation?: please contact the graduate student admissions office at your respective university. They have people who are paid to answer such questions and help you out. I’m not administrative staff, and I don’t have the time, motivation or enthusiasm to accurately answer such questions.
  • Will I get financial aid?: as I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, if you are admitted to a PhD program, you probably will. If on MS, chances are low. There are exceptions in both cases, and beyond that I don’t have an opinion. This is all I know, honest!

Lifestream: whats the big deal?


I really don’t get what all the hoopla is about “lifestreams” or “social aggregators”. They are //all over// the place these days and frankly I’m getting quite sick of them. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, Dan Taylor has a [[http://www.fabricoffolly.com/2008/03/review-of-social-aggregators.html|great review]] of 15 lifestream services ([[http://mashable.com|Mashable]] has a [[http://mashable.com/2007/07/17/social-network-aggregators/|similar survey]] of 20 aggregators).

First of all, there is **nothing new** in the technology. It is almost trivial to write your own bare bones feed aggregator. Here is a ugly, skeletal social aggregator in **THREE** lines of Python (note that I’m not counting the list of the feeds itself) using the excellent [[http://feedparser.org|Feed Parser]] module:


feeds = [
"http://del.icio.us/rss/diwakergupta",
"http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/diwakergupta/recenttracks.rss"
]

import feedparser
for feed in feeds:
result = feedparser.parse(feed)
print result.entries

Granted its not pretty, but you can imagine its not terribly hard to make it pretty. Even otherwise, [[http://www.planetplanet.org/|Planet]] has been around for almost forever, even before RSS and feeds took off like they have recently. There are plugins that achieve the same for pretty much any platform you can think of: WordPress, Drupal, Dokuwiki, Mambo, Joomla — you name it, and they probably have RSS aggregation built in.

So if technology is not the bling, what is? Undoubtedly its the social aspect of it, I hear you say! Don’t we have enough social networks already? Are you so bored by the flood of updates in your FaceBook mini-feed, that you want to engage in //yet another// social network that has //all// of your feeds?

And finally, what exactly is the business model? Everyone likes to throw around words like “revenue”, “monetization”, “personalization”, “value aggregation”, “API” etc but we have yet to see a demonstrably sustainable model. Others have raised [[http://headphono.us/2008/02/28/48-friendfeed-launches-wheres-lifestreaming-headed/|similar concerns]].

I can’t help but sense a much-ado-about-nothing kind of feeling. I rest my case with [[http://www.friendfeedfeed.com/|FriendFeedFeed]].