Supporting HTML5

It appears that supporting HTML5 has added one more battlefield in the browser war. To get a score on how well your browser supports HTML5, click here or simply type http://html5test.com/ in your browser. As of today, on my DellE6400 (yes, it's an old Dog), Mozilla 3.5.7 scored 126/300 and IE7 scored a measly 12/300. May be that is why, MicroSoft is aggressively moving forward with IE9, which should support HTML5. Looking at a youtube video (2.56 minutes), I could see the difference in performance. The demos were definitly faster on IE9 compared to firefox and google chrome. But then the video is provided by msdn! What do you think they are going to highlight? As per MicroSoft, they are doing this by harnessing the power of hardware while others are still using the software rendering. You can read more here. I believe they probably have better performance on MS-Windows environment. How IE9 performs on other operating systems remains to be seen.

So I think this (HTML5 support) is a work in progress and with time more and more features will get included in future releases of IE9 and other browsers. Based on the score from html5test, I think MicroSoft has a long way to go. But, better late then never...

What I liked about the IE9 though is the introduction of API which provides developers with the performance metrics like time taken for navigation, fetch, unload, domainlookup, connect, request, response, domLoading, domInteractive etc. You may read more here. I do agree that developers should not have to find the workaround to get these metrics and browser should make these available as it, the browser, already knows these numbers when it renders the pages. I think it is a step in the right direction and other browsers should also provide such API for developers.

SAP displays the power of BI in social networking

Thanks to Apple's iphone and smart phones we can now find the app for almost everything. But the apps are not limited to only the cell phones. We can see them on the PCs as well and also for social networking websites like Facebook. Now SAP, the ERP giant, has also entered the fray. I think it is an interesting idea to showcase the BI (Business Intelligence ) capability of anlaytics developed by SAP for anaylising the data on social networking. I feel like calling it "Personal Intelligence" (PI).

This PI app is dubbed "Friend optimiser" by SAP. While reading an article, it appeared to me that it may be able to help us decide which friends we should dump and which ones we should hang out with. Or at least, where I am spending my time (read money, since time is money) as a facebook user and how does it compare with others.

Intrigued, I decided to review the "Friend Optimiser". If you wish, you may launch it from here. Please be aware that the data used for dashboard is about you and your friends and is collected from facebook automatically. The app will ask for your permission as the first step.

Step 1: Request for permission to access the profile data, including name, picture, list of friends etc.

Step 2 Select the friends you want to analyse. I wanted to be unbiased and used "Auto select 10 friends"

Step 3 Start optimising and wallah the dashboard is ready. Here is the image of what it looked like for me.

Performance indicators for a website.

Hi All,
Worldcup for soccer is on and all the sports pundits have been talking about US vs Britain's game. (Draw is considered a win for relatively inexperienced US team.) So when I saw reference to fifa on the rss feed from Azaxian(Dion Almaer's article), I got a little inquisitive as to what is the connection between soccer and web technologies. To my surprise it lead me to some information that I have been looking for sometime now. I always wanted to know what are the various parameters on which I can measure the performace of any website.

I believe that for any website, including fifa, it is very important to have performance related metrics and the acceptable range for each of them. I think the article gave a very good summary of various metrics. Although, the article recommends what kind of values would be considered good, acceptable or unacceptable, but I believe that would vary from organisation to organisation. So I would take these values as a starting point and then fine tune for a given organisation.

Once again, the article can be referenced here.

Why CIOs Are Last Among Equals?

This article on bloomberg got my attention. It was titled "Is The Typical CIO a "Gear Guy?" " While the article in itself was so so but the it lead me to an interesting recent article in Wall Street Journal.

The arcticle takes 'report card' like approach for a typical CIO. It lists the skills (strategy, influence, leadership, communication, synthesis, relationship building) needed and then kind of grade a typical CIO/Manager. I was deligted to see when it talked about "Strategic thinking" which is relevent to our current class for Dr Money. Some of the stuff was also related to what Bob covered in Decision making class.

Sorry for the digression. I felt like sharing the article which I think is worth reading once at least.

Facebook Woes

As we know, after changing their privacy policy, facebook constantly find them selves in the center of the discussion. With the likes of Linked-In, facebook and twitter, Social Networking is evolving to be an important component in Web2.0 technologies.

I had hard time believing that advertisement revenue is enough to sustain the growth of these companies. Even if it was enough, I had little doubt in the power of corporate greed for more revenues. Hence, the commercialization of the user information, to me, was inevitable. So I was hardly surprised when I read the raucous discussions about the changes to privacy policy of facebook.

I tend to believe that the changes facebook is making to their privacy policy (which, to my surprise, happens to be longer then the US constitution) are driven by their need to increase their revenue by cashing on the information provided by the users. Yes, it is true users have the choice to “opt out” which is easier said then done, especially when it is in the interest of face book to make the "opt out" procedure difficult. Without any intervention from government and/or threat of competition, I have no doubt who is going win this tussle between facebook and users. Since when have the bigger fish starting protecting the smaller ones? So I was delighted to see when I read the following two articles. One is about the possible legislation/supervision from government and other is about the rise of competition like pip.io.

• Senator Charles Schumer has urged the F.T.C. to provide guidelines
• Rivals Seize on Troubles of Facebook

Let us hope these developments will create enough pressure and facebook will address the situation sooner rather later.

MySQL Workbench 5.2.21 RC Available

If anybody finds working with cli (command line interface) for mysql, hard and unproductive, 'MySQL Workbench' is the GUI tool that will help with most of the common tasks. The latest release is 'MySQL Workbench 5.2 RC' and has the features for following activities:

• SQL Editor
• Data Modeling
• Administration
  

The application is open source and can be downloaded from here. I downloaded from University of Wisconsin mirror. It is easy to install and configure with your existing mysql databases.