On the road again: June 2008

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Chetan Bhagat's 3rd book

I managed to read the third book by Chetan Bhagat - "the 3 mistakes of my life" a while back.

As it is with Chetan's earlier 2 books, this is again a story based on Indian youth generation. And unlike the earlier books that centred around IIT life and call centre, this one is based on the entrepreneurship and the struggle the main protagonists go through with cricket and religion mixed in.

This book too is captivating and urges one to pick up the book and keep reading ahead. However, after reading through I felt that somehow it lacks the punch that I have come to expect from Chetan. Of course, cricket and religion are an important aspect of an Indian youth. I am unable to point out why it is so. That said, this book is way above the other story books out there for a normal irregular reader like me.

However, one thing that caught my interest was in the "Acknowledgements" page of the book. Wherein Chetan mentions that the goal of the publisher's - Rupa and Co was "to make India read". A worthy intention indeed....

Update: In pursuit of their goal, the publishers have done one right thing that I have noticed - the price of all the 3 books by CB have been Rs.95/- only. The price matters a lot for the readers in India.

Bangalore directions and live traffic info

For many of us who have used the google maps, yahoo maps and mapquest for driving directions while abroad and wondered when we could get the same utility for Bangalore, we have some options. In fact they have been around for sometime, but I hadn't noticed them.

BTIS (Bangalore Traffic Information System) - Provides directions and live traffic conditions
Yahoo! India maps

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Flash Player and P2P

As most of you might already know, Adobe released Flash 10 beta (code named Astro) version some days back. Its available for the developers and early testers to play around at Adobe labs.

I am not a flash developer nor do I work with any of the other Adobe technologies (Apollo, AIR,...). However one key feature of the Flash 10 release caught my eye among a host of other features. Flash Player 10 supports peer to peer communication, and that opens up a host of possibilities for the kind of applications that we can expect. This release supports a new protocol called RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) which provides inherent P2P support for the flash applications. I can imagine all sorts of rich applications like games, chat applications, fil sharing and other multimedia applications that can exploit this new feature. It's most likely that Adobe is integrating much more functionality into Flash like say VoIP, with P2P providing the base infrastructure. Else I wonder what a VoIP and IETF guy like Henry Sinnreich is upto at Adobe?

However as one reads deeper into the P2P details in the release, one can say that the peer-to-peer communication is sort of supported in a hybrid way. The whole P2P infrastructure will be managed by a future Adobe Flash Media Server technology and the details about the server availability is not yet known. The underlying protocol used is UDP, which was probably chosen for NAT traversal and for it's relative low-latency for multimedia streaming. All the Flash applications sort of register with Adobe Flash Media Server and then the Media Server links up the interested flash applications that want to interact and also conveys the respective IP network addresses. And then gets out of the way. The respective flash applications then talk to each other directly and exchange information. This is sort of hybrid pseudo-P2P mechanism that's employed by the likes of Skype. RTMFP seems to be a proprietary protocol as of now and the inherent P2P infrastructure is unlike the self-healing, self-discovering, scalable and distributed overlay P2P framework of other P2P applications like the file sharing apps. Further Adobe is saying that Flash P2P can not be used for massive file-sharing purposes. But I guess, that should not prohibit primitive file sharing apps to be using Flash 10. One of the advantages that flash has over any p2p overlay is that it has a large deployment since its claimed that almost 95% of machines have the flash installed.

Oh that reminds me of yet another exciting feature of this new release. Flash 10 allows native file access so users can read and save the files back to native file system.

For some more exciting discussions and comments,