ifacethoughts

Technical Colleges In India To Use Office 365, Sad

This is sad! Enforcing a proprietary system on students is sad. Getting the educational institutions locked into vendors is sad. “Microsoft provided enterprise-grade services and support whereas other vendors did not. Data security and privacy were of paramount importance to us, and we felt that Office 365 offered the compliance features that we required. [Continue]

Why Are All New Technologies Open Sourced?

A friend recently put up this question on the board. He comes from the Microsoft world and is one of the developers at a startup right now. His curiosity fetched him Erlang and Node.js for servers, ember.js and backbone.js along with RabbitMQ and Celery and so on. All these are open sourced, and hence this question. His guess was marketing. [Continue]

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz

One of the worst days. He managed to teach a lot to the world – through fighting for Internet freedom, programming, blogging, hacking, everything he did to keep information open. Hats off to Aaron who managed to build systems that got people together, change the information flow and went to great lengths to give us access to information. Unfortunately some people didn’t like it and managed to depress him so much. I think even his death teaches us something, about how much more we can do to keep the information open and accessible. [Continue]

Inside The Browser

How are the internals of a browser that is trying to show you a simple Web page you requested? You will be surprised! The ‘Render Tree Construction’ section is very interesting. Writing a browser, along with writing a compiler, can be a learning exercise.

WYSIWYG On Web Is Wrong

I know I have said this before, but WYSIWYG editor is a wrong solution for managing content on the Web. On the Web, we want content to be separated from its formatting, and WYSIWYG editors offer the exact opposite. Markdown, Textile, even WYSIWYM works well, but WYSIWYG editors are still the most user-friendly feature advertised by CMSs. And we still keep fixing whatever these editors break on the Web.

Xfce’s Approach

I am more than a little late in linking to this, but it is worth archiving. Nick Shermer’s interview tells you a lot about the team’s approach towards Xfce. I think that is how it hits the right balance.

Another Switch In Arch Linux, To systemd

Close on the heels of migration to GRUB2 comes another switch in the Arch Linux world – to systemd. And I won’t lag behind, though I am getting used to being indifferent towards these switches. With help of the excellent Arch Linux wiki, all my Arch Linux machines now boot using pure systemd installation. Systemd is not new to other distributions, And it seems more capable than the SysV-style inits. However, like GRUB2, it seems to have more moving parts. [Continue]

Learning Power Tools

If you are thinking of learning a power tool, listen to Drew Neil’s advice. The article focuses on vim in comparison with other text editors, but this advice is applicable to all power tools. A typical quality of power tools is the difficult learning curve. Many try to bypass that by making it behave like something they already know. This makes it familiar in the beginning, but dangerous as well. [Continue]

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Abhijit Nadgouda
iface Consulting
India
+91 9819820312
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This is the weblog of Abhijit Nadgouda where he writes down his thoughts on software development and related topics. You are invited to subscribe to the feed to stay updated or check out more subscription options. Or you can choose to browse by one of the topics.