I just came back from IIT Guwahati and discovered that Dennis Ritchie has passed away Most people would know of Dennis Ritchie as the person who invented C and Unix. What most folks do not realize is how profound C and Unix were when they were created and what amazing impact they have had on [...]
Oct 142011
Oct 062011
Steve Jobs passed away today – I woke up and read the news on my iPhone, like much of the world. I never thought I would be so affected by the passing away of someone I never knew personally. But if you are in the world of tech and developing consumer products, it is not [...]
Mar 172011
As I have mentioned in earlier posts, we are building a x-platform mobile chat client. One of the platforms is iPhone and that means that the team is having to learn Objective C, and therefore C. Last couple of days, I have been spending time helping my team understand and appreciate C better. Yesterday, we [...]
Mar 122011
As I mentioned on my previous post, we are building a x-platform native mobile chat client for Android, iPhone and Blackberry. The earlier post was about the Android platform, this one is on Blackberry. After having gone thru the Android documentation and videos from Google IO, I found the documentation on Blackberry to be somewhat [...]
Mar 072011
One of the products we are building at Directi is a x-platform mobile chat client. Developing it has been arduous – we experimented with Phonegap and then Titanium and found both lacking (see this Quora thread for details). So now we are building this as three native apps, targeting iPhone, Android and Blackberry. In this [...]
The web-browser is not an easy platform to program against. I realized this in Dec 2008 when we decided to change the architecture of one of our products at Directi to a pure JavaScript client talking to a REST API, and even more so in Apr 2009 when we decided to build our desktop product [...]
Nov 022010
The PDC 2010 got over last weekend and there seems to be some interesting stuff that has come out of Redmond. While most of the big changes are on the Cloud side, the roadmap on the web and mobile platform is much clearer now with some important changes in strategy. Cloud Ok, I’m gonna stick [...]
Oct 302010
Facebook these days reminds me a lot of Microsoft of yore. For one, they are taking a platform approach exactly like Microsoft – Facebook Connect is the most powerful and widely used identity platform on the Internet today – as enticing to developers and businesses as Windows was in its heydays. They have succeeded where [...]
Oct 302010
Last year, when I moved to Blogger, my decision was influenced by: Staying with a cloud provider for the blog service Ability to install plugins Now WordPress.com does not allow you to install plugins unless you are really big, and therefore Blogger made sense. However, I have found Blogger to be very limiting and every time [...]
Jan 052010
At Directi, we are taking a hard look at the way our applications need to store and retrieve data, and whether we really need to use a traditional RDBMS for all scenarios. This does not mean that we will eschew relational systems altogether. What it means is that we will use the best tool for [...]
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