January 15th, 2011

Facebook?

No no, I’m not late to the party and I’m not asking literally how does one use the above mentioned services. Rather, I’m asking how does one put these various services to use. When do you post something on Twitter but not on Buzz, Facebook but not on Twitter; or do you post everything everywhere (ping.fm style)? I’m not a heavy hitter by any means and my usage of social networks is mediocre at best. Yet I myself confounded with all of the various services and their accompanying warts and virtues. Don’t you?

To help sort out my thoughts, I drew a picture (don’t you dare judge me for my lack of creativity!):

Below I elaborate more on how I currently use each of the services.

Twitter

I tend to use it for technical and/or non-personal content. Things that I would want to publicize.
Unlike Buzz/Facebook, I don’t pay too much attention to who is following me. Most tweets are public anyways.
The 140 character limit is sometimes amusing, but often irritating. Are people still using regular SMS with Twitter?
Multiple startups devoted to managing Twitter “noise” is not encouraging.
@ replies are bandaid. Twitter is a broadcast-and-forget medium — I can’t have (or follow) a conversation on it.

Facebook

Use it for sharing random, personal updates (or things I find interesting :p)
Mostly on because of network effect (read: don’t want to be left off the social bandwagon).
Like that I can “Like” most things and actually follow the conversation via comments.
Always worried if my privacy settings are working and if there’s a new “default” I need to worry about.
Pay more attention to who I friend. The noise level is still quite high despite that.

Buzz

Usage domain similar to that of Facebook. Unlike Facebook, can choose to make posts Public.
Love the email integration. Conversely, API/clients still have to catch up to Twitter.
Supports likes, comments and “resharing”.
Privacy is modeled around my contacts (chat or otherwise), which seems natural.

I’m fine with using Twitter for all of my public posts. The main confusion lies between Buzz and Facebook. Facebook obviously has more social traction. That said, Buzz is just more convenient to use (because of the email integration mostly). Of course, all of the various connectors available (Twitter <-> Buzz, Twitter <-> Facebook, multicast via ping.fm or Chromedeck etc) make the whole thing even more confusing. At the end of the day, I might just go back to not using anything on a regular basis.

How are you using Twitter, Buzz and Facebook?

January 9th, 2011

Startup Infrastructure: Where Linux Fails

It is no secret that I’m an open source evangelist and so when it was time to set up internal infrastructure at work, naturally the first order of business was to evaluate the various OSS projects out there — everything from wikis, bug trackers, source control, code review and project management. Running Ubuntu LTS (10.04) on all of our servers was a no-brainer and there were plenty of excellent options for most everything else as well (a follow-up post on our final choices later). The Linux ecosystem is fabulous for most of the infrastructure needs of a startup, but I learnt the hard way that there are still some areas where Linux needs a lot of work before it can become competitive with proprietary, non-Linux solutions.

Authentication

Centralized account management (users and groups) and authentication is critical component in any IT deployment, no matter the size. Even for a small startup, creating users/groups repeatedly for each new server, separate authentication mechanisms for each new service is simply not scalable. That is precisely why Active Directory is so ubiquitous at enterprises.

LDAP was the obvious solution in Linux-land and I figured it would be trivial to setup an OpenLDAP server that can manage user/group information for us. It would also be the single authentication source for all servers and services. I was so wrong.

After struggling with OpenLDAP for several painful hours, I gave up — the documentation is fragmented, Google doesn’t help much and personally I think the LDAP creators had never heard of “usability” when designing it. The seemingly simple task of creating some new users and groups involved several black-magic incantations of the LDAP command line tools. Getting servers to authenticate against the resulting directory was even harder.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel and setup an AD instance in-house, I stumbled upon the 389 Directory Server (now known as the Fedora Directory Server). With a new found hope, I set about installing it on Ubuntu and hit another roadblock — there are no up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Reluctantly, I setup a Fedora instance (the only one so far) and installed FDS. Thankfully, Red Hat has put together really comprehensive documentation and guides for the Directory Server, which was invaluable.

From there on, it was mostly downhill (only a few minor hiccups). Finally we have a nice GUI to manage users and groups, and all servers/services authenticate against a single Directory Server. But the journey was unnecessarily painful. Here’s what I’d like to see:

Up-to-date packages of FDS for Ubuntu. Sane defaults and functionality out-of-the-box
Ready to consume documentation on how to integrate LDAP with various web applications, Linux distros etc (I’ll put together some of this soon)
More awareness — I should have found FDS a lot sooner than I did, but it is certainly not very well marketed
Single sign on: This is a whole different beast

Remote Access

At my previous company, we had a Cisco VPN solution. There were plenty of Cisco compatible VPN clients on Windows and Mac. In fairness, it was relatively easy to get vpnc working on Ubuntu as well. In fact, with Network Manager, you can manage your VPN connections using a simple and intuitive UI. But the setup was not very reliable and my connections would get dropped relatively frequently. It was impossible to have a long-running VPN session without disruption. I’m not sure if the problem was with the Cisco hardware or the Ubuntu vpnc client; I did see similar issues with the built-in VPN client on Mac OS X.

But at least VPN on Linux works. I can’t say the same about other remote access mechanisms, in particular IPSec and L2TP over IPSec. It took me some time to figure out which package to use (Strongswan, Openswan, iked etc etc); another couple of hours to get the Openswan configuration just right; several hours of struggling to automatically setup DNS lookups when using the IPSec connection (gave up and ended up using entries in /etc/hosts!). There is no UI in Network Manager to manage IPSec connections either. Strongswan does have a NM plugin, but that only works for IKEv2 (certificate based authentication), while I had to use IKEv1 (shared key based authentication).

At the end of the day, I do have a working IPSec tunnel and it is definitely more reliable than the Cisco VPN (been up for more than 2 days without disruption). But all this can and should become a lot more seamless.

These are a few areas where Linux failed me in setting up the infrastructure for a startup; it shines most everywhere else. Hopefully these last few kinks will get ironed out soon.

December 13th, 2010

Yeh hai Mumbai meri jaan

: Image by Brajeshwar via Flickr

I can’t claim that I know Mumbai: I’ve never lived there and the only times I’ve visited have been short work-related trips. Yet I always thought that all Indians should have some innate familiarity with that city of dreams, just by virtue of being Indians (not to mention the healthy coverage of Mumbai in Bollywood movies). Everyone is familiar with the Gateway of India, Bollywood movies and movie stars, vada-pav, local trains, monsoons, Marine drive and such. And thus, I felt a strange mixture of fascination, sadness and yes, a bit of betrayal recently, as I read two compelling books about Mumbai.

In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta rediscovers Mumbai as he returns (multiple times) to the city he grew up in. Through his eyes, we catch a glimpse of the lives of gangsters and foot soldiers, students and school teachers, bar dancers and prostitutes, yogis and Jainis. Names like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Tanuja, Preity Zinta are instantly recognizable and lend the book a voyeuristic appeal. At times disturbing, but always intriguing, Mehta paints a vivid picture of Mumbai, one that I did not know exist. And yet, the book felt “safe”, for Mehta was usually telling stories about others.

On the other hand, Gregory David Roberts as Shantaram is at once more intimate yet surreal. While reading it, I remember thinking to myself “fact is stranger than fiction” many a times over. Shantaram is as gripping as an autobiography of sorts can be, but probably contains a tad too many preachy one-liners and life lessons. It was even more fascinating than Maximum City because it is set in a time when I was just a kid — Mehta’s stories are far more contemporary. I found myself Googling for the various characters and places in the book, desperately trying to judge the fraction of fiction in the treatise. But it doesn’t really matter — Mr. Robert’s story is an incredible one nonetheless.

Meanwhile, I think I’m going to stay away from books about Mumbai for some time now, lest I feel completely alien to the city I never really knew.

September 17th, 2010

Reclaim the TV

Do you:

wonder who watches all of the 700+ channels that you get from your cable provider?
wonder why you are paying more than $50/month for all those channels, when you only watch a handful?
find yourself channel surfing, just because you can, not because you know what you want to watch?
feel like you are not getting the most out of your TV?
feel like you can’t wait for Google TV or the Boxee box to improve your television experience?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I have a few tips for you. There have been times when I spent an hour flipping through channels, not really watching anything in particular, and later feeling like an idiot for having wasted my time. All this while I just accepted that cable TV as a given, an inevitable companion of our internet service provider… until I met a few friends who were perfectly happy without any cable service.

With that inspiration, I started looking around for a better TV experience. There is so much content available online (and good content!) that I wasn’t really worried about lack of material to watch. Both Google TV and the Boxee box seemed very promising (not to mention, the new Apple TV). There were two little problems:

Neither Boxee box nor Google TV are here yet, and
All of these devices have very very limited functionality. They address the problem of Internet TV, but I don’t want to use my TV to just watch TV. I want it to become a hub for all my media. I want to access my local music, photos, videos and more.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do — I built my own media center PC. It runs Ubuntu; it hosts all my media in a single location; it serves as media server and storage server; and it serves as a compute server when I have to transcode media. You can find all the gory details in this guide: HOWTO Build an Ubuntu based media center.