Book Review: Govind Narayan’s Mumbai

This is a follow-up to the blog entry announcing the book that my cousin had translated. I finally got down to reading it, and must say I liked the book, its content, and the notes added by the translator – Murali (yes, my cousin).

The book is available for purchase on Amazon -  “Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863“. I have posted a review of the book there.

There were some minor errors/nitpicks that I noticed in the book:

• Some words in the text are italicized but do not have notes entries for them. This inconsistency is a bit of an annoyance, because the notes are situated at the end of the book, and do not appear as a footnote on the pages that contain the italicized words. Pages 204 and 205 for example contain such examples.
• Some words are not italicized at all… for instance “Bharat Khand” on pg 203. I would have expected this to have some sort of a note, because the non-Indian reader would not have a clue as to what this means.
• Some of the italicized units of measure could have been converted to some metric unit of measure, in the notes section, so that the reader could estimate or visualize what the term means. For instance, “man”, “ser”, etc.
• Some inconsistency in names of places – Pune and Poona are both used in the text.

I haven’t noted down all the nitpicks/minor-errors in the book. Will note them down in this blog entry, the next time I browse through the book.

Redis: Java client

I have been looking at Redis the past week, and realized that a Java client for Redis would help my cause… so quickly wrote one up. Its available here:  redis-java-client-rename-to-zip (please note, I saved it as .ppt to get it to upload to wordpress. Its actually a .zip file, just rename the extension to .zip to use it.)

One of the things I noticed is that the benchmarks numbers are way lower, through this Java client, than if I were to run the ./redis-benchmark. These are the numbers that I see, haven’t figured out what to make of it.

./redis-benchmark numbers

~/redis-beta-8$ ./redis-benchmark -q
PING: 49266.01 requests per second
SET: 56191.01 requests per second
GET: 53191.49 requests per second
INCR: 29697.33 requests per second
LPUSH: 43125.00 requests per second
LPOP: 40249.00 requests per second

Java client benchmark numbers

SET rates: 13027.44 requests per second.
GET rates: 13412.41 requests per second.
SETNX rates: 14118.09 requests per second.
PING rates: 16025.10 requests per second.
INCR rates: 13786.44 requests per second.
LPUSH rates: 15134.22 requests per second.
LPOP rates: 13687.28 requests per second.

Ubuntu Migration: Experiences

Helping out Chandra to migrate from his current Windows based laptop to an Ubuntu based one.

The main things we attempted to do:

Upgrade the current laptop

• Current R40e felt sluggish, and some trouble-shooting determined that the Harddrive was the cause. Changed the HDD to a spanking new 160GB IDE one.Current config is 256MB RAM. Something we can live with for the moment.

Helping out with Technology concepts

Had a conversation today with a faculty member from a local college, and she wanted to talk to someone from IBM on an area that she intends to focus on as part her course (not the one she teaches, but the one she is enrolled into).

Basically she felt she needed to work on some usecases and problems in the area of SOA, and Semantic Web.

Rather than having a discussion straight away on these technology areas,

Mumbai: Urban biography

My cousin, Murali Ranganathan, has translated a book by Govind Narayan. Looking forward to getting a copy of it, soon.

This book interests me primarily because it talks about Mumbai during the mid-1800, and going by the foreword excerpts, and some of the conversation that Murali and I have had, Govind Narayan’s book is a good snapshot of the city of that period.

Review to follow, once I get a copy

Art of foresight…

Came across this rather interesting read, about the business of going about making a forecast, or to use foresight

Emphasizes the usual common sense techniques of  working your way towards a prediction: scan, trends, validate, and provide a vision.

Geography, and music

This concept of viewing a musician’s compositions, its relevance to the society of that time, observations about people, and places entwined in the music, and all of this viewed in the context of geography, is a rather interesting one.

Some of my discussions with Shekar (Chandra to some) on this topic have always been mesmerizing, and its great to see that he intends to put some degree of structure around these ideas, and also get to see them materialize into a project of sorts.

Somehow this idea of looking beyond the obvious, or linking seemingly different topics interests me. Godel-Escher-Bach is one of them. Some of the ideas that Shekar is investigating in this area is to mine content from a specific context – Geography – and presenting the results in a manner that brings out interesting possibilities. Any other GEB similarities ends there.

Some of the projects that Shekar intends to pursue are listed out here.

Installing Yaws on Windows

I wanted to try out YAWS- a webserver written in Erlang, and see if it works fine on Windows XP.

There is some decent amount of content on how to install YAWS on Windows. See here, here, and a discussion that I kicked off. In any case, I wanted to ensure that I capture my experience with installing this correctly.

I have copied content from here, and modified it to illustrate what worked for me:

Yoohoo ..

…finally got down to creating a babble space for myself. Recently started blogging within my company’s intranet, and found it to be a fun and useful thing to do. But then again, there are topics which are best written about outside of the company’s intrane. Hoping that this space will help with that.