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.EU domains are only for EU residents!
Just last month I was all praises of the European Union for its pioneering work in framing laws that protect the interest of online users with #GDPR, and, for announcing a bug-bounty to find security holes in the Open Source software it uses including VLC Player, 7-Zip, Filezilla, KeePass, Notepad++ and others. But this week’s guidance from UK government for owners of .EU domains is not encouraging. It appears that .EU domains can only be bought by EU residents and UK residents who already have a .EU domain may be sued or get kicked out post #Brexit. Registrars including GoDaddy are already implementing the rules. In the past I had…
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Why I am trying Brave Browser and reverted to Google Chrome?
In the olden days, life was simpler – browsing online meant using the inbuilt Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on Mac OS X. Then came Google Chrome, moving the entire web browser space to high gear it changed everything. Microsoft IE and Firefox became casualties of Chrome’s success. Till a few weeks ago, I was “happy” with Microsoft Edge as my default browser, and in the few cases where a site (mostly Government & Google’s own) had issues with Edge I used Google Chrome. But now, with Edge moving to Chromium rendering engine I was curious about how browsers based on Chromium rendering engine will differ from Google Chrome.…
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Google Plus and making secure products
Even though I thought that the “Don’t be evil” mantra of Google was nothing more than a brilliant marketing slogan, I always admire(d) the company for its engineering and security prowess. They are way ahead of Apple and even Facebook when it comes to their software expertise. In that context, it is sad that this company too is reacting to a security vulnerability than being proactive. While I feel for the loss of Google+, the only competitor (at the time of its launch) to the monopoly of Facebook, no one will be missing it. As a Google Pixel user, I am disappointed that the changes announced to Android privacy/app scrutiny…
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Google for Tamil
As someone who has been involved for over two decades, it is heartening to witness the progress Tamil language computing has achieved in recent years. In the early decade(s) the pace of development (for Tamil) was painstakingly slow and limited to fonts and keyboards, then it just took off – coinciding with the meteoric rise of Mobile phone users in India. In the early years, the Tamil technology pioneers had to work very hard to see their language show up on the computer screen when none of the platform software vendors cared for any of the non-latin languages. Even within Tamilians, we had bitter ways over the technology standards to…
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User Interface Malfunction
மேலேயுள்ள செய்தியைப் பாருங்கள். தமிழக அரசின் நகர மற்றும் ஊரமைப்பு இயக்குநரகத்தின் இணையத்தளத்தில், கிராமங்களின் பெயர்களை ‘டிராப்-டவுன்’ பட்டியலில் சேர்ப்பதில் சிக்கலாம்! அழுவதா, சிரிப்பதா என்று தெரியவில்லை. மென்பொருள் பற்றிய புரிதல் இவ்வளவு குறைவாக, படித்த அதிகாரிகள் இடமே இப்படி இருக்கிறதே என்று. இதை நம்மால் சரியாக செய்யமுடியவில்லை என்றால், இந்தியா ஒரு மென்பொருள் வல்லரசு என்று சொல்வதில் ஒரு அர்த்தமும் இல்லை.
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Excite.com
For every Mobile App you develop even before you get into doing Big Data or Prediction, you need to allow the user to customize it for their individual preferences. Personalization is a key ingredient. The other day while thinking on this subject, I remembered my earliest experience of using an online (web) service that could be heavily customized to my taste, and that was Excite.com. It should be around 1996-98, the portal, when it was the most fashionable technology, was my favourite. It was my homepage, where I went for search, latest news, used it extensively almost everyday. In the screenshot (courtesy web.archive.org) below you will see an area just below their logo on top…
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Software design, little has changed in the last 70 years
On 19 February 1946 Alan Turing designed the first well-known software for a stored-program computer. Seventy years later, each of us is carrying numerous apps (software) in our pockets and wrists. Software today can be incredibly powerful, they contain millions of lines of code, can guide nuclear missiles to their target, and even recognize the human voice and translate them on the fly. Today’s mobile apps like Microsoft Word or Facebook are more complex than the entire software stack that powered Apollo 11 spaceflight. The technology powering Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Microsoft’s Halolens were impossible even ten years before. The growth in areas like Cloud Computing, Big Data, Machine…
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Are we all messed up?
We are living in one of the best times in human history, enjoying unparalleled access to wealth of written knowledge dating back 2500+ years. And all this through what Sir Tim Berners Lee invented called “World Wide Web”. The power of Web is its nested nature and links (Hyperlinks) to other resources. At the same time, this nested nature of web introduces randomness to our work and behaviour. As humans, we will need more time for our genes to catch up to this. I can hear you saying “Venkat” why all this sudden thinking?. Just look at this workflow I went through in my work for the last 1 hour.…
