Xaces

Roundtrip HTTPS

Nirmal — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:20:40 +0000

I just read this interesing article at InfoQ on the “The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection” and is interesting to note what all happens behind the scenes in a HTTPS connection.

Twitter Search

Nirmal — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:48:54 +0000

Today I really felt the importance for Real-Time search updates. I wanted to find out if the quota for the H1B for FY2010 was met. Searched Google and other places, even searched the USCIS page which is supposed to have the information, but turned up empty handed. The only place on the Web I was able to get the real time update was on Twitter Search. Awesome….

Here’s the query for H1B http://search.twitter.com/search?q=H1B. Lot of people have been saying the enormous benefits of real time search and the potential for Twitter to excel in this space. Hoping to see a lot of advancements in this area. Also to note FriendFeed also has the search feature, but most of its feeds come from Twitter.

Finally if you are new to Twitter. I recommend you get an account asap and start “tweeting”. I for one am not too crazy about updating my status every few mins, I hardly send any updates. But the majority of the potential lies with live news coverage and coverage of events from thousands of perspectives, the possibilities are just limitless.

ESB Core Capabilities

Nirmal — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:13:37 +0000

I’ve been researching ESB’s lately and thought it’d be good to post a list of core capabilities requirements for an ESB. The main reason behind this is, all the vendors out there with ESBesque products just try to market a whole lot of fluff. This info will provide you a starting point when you start researching on ESB’s and what to expect of them.

Routing

Message routing according to specific business needs
Static/deterministic routing
Policy based routing
Rules base routing
Ultimately provide service location transparency

Message Transformation

Transform an incoming message into several outgoing formats and structure
Ex. XML to Json, XML to Java objects etc

Message Enhancement

Ability to isolate the client and make some basic changes to the message
Ex. change date format of incoming message
Append informational data to messages

Protocol transformation

The ability to accept one input protocol and communicate with another service provider on a different protocol
Physical components, include the actual protocol, HTTP to RMI or IIOP etc.
Logical aspect deals with the type of message
Feature provided through adapters

Service mapping

Transform a business service to the actual implementation service
Knowledge of the various services
Static/deterministic mapping of a service to a particular IP and port
Feature provided through a service lookup or a service registry

Message processing

Ability to manage state and perform request management, by accepting an input and provide an response back to the calling agent
Guaranteed message delivery
Management of message transactions
Reliable messaging, asynchronous/synchronous messaging, publish/subscribe

Process choreography & Service Orchestration

Manage complex business services to perform a business operation.
Manage process flow
Service orchestration is the ability to manage the coordination of multiple service implementations
Process choreography is about business services and service orchestration is coordination of their actual implementations
Abstract business services from actual implemented services.

Transaction management

Ability to provide a single unit of work for a business request, providing framework for coordination of multiple disparate systems.
Frameworks to be utilized
- JSR 95 Activity scope
- WS-Coordination

Security

Protect services from unauthorized access.
Needs an authorization framework.

Blogging schedules

Nirmal — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:12:42 +0000

I’ve been trying to keep up with a schedule and it wasn’t working. So from now on, the posts are going to be either spread out or more in one go. I’m mainly going to be concentrating on a single topic at a time and have several posts covering that aspect as I research various topics.

Chroming lately

Nirmal — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 02:43:55 +0000

Most of you would have started using Google Chrome now, the fancy new browser. It is undoubtedly light weight and fast and has built in support for Google gears, but it just has this little Privacy thing, which most would not want to expose. Every Chrome installation contains a unique id, which Google uses to track the browser user information. Here’s 3 ways to disable/remove the unique id, read more at ReadWriteWeb. I just UnChromed my installation.

Document embedding in websites

Nirmal — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:09:23 +0000

I’ve been using Scribd for some time now and wanted an embedded viewer for my blog. Scribd does now have that option to embed or the new Quick Switch which can convert all documents on your site into iPaper links. Recently I happened to come across Issuu which is also a document sharing site much like Scribd. It also has the same feature as iPaper, but the interface seemed to be a lot better. All you have to do is add some javascript code into your html pages and .doc’s, .pdf’s, .ppt’s will automatically be uploaded and will be viewable from within your site.

Here’s some examples. No more downloading of pdf’s and doc’s.

HPC Basic Profile.doc

JBoss AS Clustering.pdf

Update: This won’t work from your RSS readers. So go on to the website to actually see it.

ClusterSSH

Nirmal — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:28:15 +0000

Every sysadmin maintaining more than a couple of systems would have always had to log onto multiple systems to perform some daily tasks. In most HPC environments where 100’s or 1000’s of machines are part of every cluster, there are various tools to help do just that. But on a smaller scale where you would just ssh to perform some tasks ClusterSSH is a really cool tool. With ClusterSSH it is possible to make a SSH connection to multiple servers and perform tasks from one single command window, without any scripting. ClusterSSH – cssh opens multiple xterm sessions and pipes in your commands to all those terminals.

You can connect to any specified server with the following command line.

#cssh [user@]host [[user@]host1 [user@]host2 ...]

Or you can set a list of servers in a configuration file and reference it by means of a tag

[user@]host [[user@]host1 [user@]host2 ...]

and then you can connect to all those servers with

#cssh

The tags can be placed at a user level at $HOME/.csshrc or globally at /etc/clusters. Get the download and more info at ClusterSSH Wiki.

Information Explosion

Nirmal — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:21:23 +0000

IDC with EMC conducted a study of how much data is created every year, this includes a host of personal electronics to the internet. Here’s an interesting ticker depicting the amount of data that was created this year and ticking…..

www.linuxmachines.com

Nirmal — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:59:06 +0000

Interesting, I happened to be searching for some cheap PC’s without an OS, so I can install Linux on them. It just occurred to me that I heard of Linux Machines, so I typed in the url “www.linuxmachines.com“, that’s when I was surprised, it redirected instantly to Google.

Coming to the main question, is that one of Google’s new projects or secret projects for which they might need that domain name. I know Google uses its one custom built flavor of Linux for its data centers, not sure if they want to have that publicly available.

Why need Vista or OS X anymore?

Nirmal — Wed, 09 May 2007 03:16:10 +0000

I have tried various OSes over the past few years, but nothing has impressed me as much as Linux. The power and flexibility of Linux drew me to it initially, but now it even has cool eye candy. The pictures below are taken on Ubuntu 7.04 running Beryl. It’s an evolving 3D windowing system, I say evolving because of the not so good support for all graphics cards on Linux, and yes there are some bugs, its not a full production system. But that’s not the point here, its about the endless possibilities Linux offers.

It provides Expose style effects allowing you to easily switch between windows. You can switch between windows on multiple workspaces too. Provides better alt+tab visualization, transparent windows, depth visualization and zoom in feature. There’s also 3D desktop switching, which I was not able to take a snapshot of. It has other neat effects like blur, which in most cases is not really useful and some more eye candy stuff provided your graphics card supports it. My card is a old ATI Radeon 9000, for which there’s not much support in the form of drivers, but still I get these wonderful effects. In most cases more than the eye candy its really useful when you have a lot of windows open and want to see through the clutter.