My company Compassites get into this interesting problem once in a while. Since we are a startup we live in a small office and we take the responsibility of opening and closing the office. We have two keys. There are set of people who come late and work late in the evening and go home late, and there are set of people who come early in the morning and leave home early. Sometimes we run into this problem of both the keys taken by the people who go home late and the next day people who came early had to wait outside and try reaching people who had the keys. Then we formulated this process that one key will always be with one of them who come early and one key with one of them who goes home late.

Talking about keys, it reminds me of a cryptography concept called public key certificate. This is how it works. There are two keys, public and private. The concept is simple. A public key is used to lock and the private is used to unlock. For example if Ram wanted to send an encrypted message to Shyam, Shyam used the public key of Ram to encrypt the message and send it across to him. Then Ram used his private key to decrypt the message and use it. There is a significant advantage using this mechanism. Ram and Shyam do not have to share a secret key and the sending party can only encrypt and not decrypt any message. Public key certificate has played a significant role in web application security in the form of digital certificates or authorization certificates.

Today there was a news in the Karnataka edition of the Indian national newspaper The Hindu titled Where are all the potholes?In Bangalore there are lot of potways (yes highways became potways) where you can find some road here and there in between pot holes. Am glad that the Bangalore municipality finally took some action fixing these pot holes. More than just taking the action, I am impressed the way it was handled. After fixing certain roads, it announced a prize for any person who still spotted a pot hole. The interesting thing is the prize money didn't come from the treasury but from the zonal engineer's salary if there was still a pot hole in the road coming under his area. And guess what the result was? No one has got a prize yet, because the job was done clean. Sometimes accountability by punishment also pays off.

On Sunday I got an opportunity to attend the Computer Graphics meet by Rhythm & Hues, India here in Bangalore. The topic was Chronicles of Narnia - Behind the scenes. Rhythm & Hues (R&H)was the visual effect provider for the movie in collaboration with Sony. It was quite a crowd where there were lot of young students in the area of digital animation from various colleges and institutes.

When R&H talked about softwares and hardwares used, it was good to know that it uses a customized version of Linux (Initially RedHat and now Suse)as their operating system. One of the key area of animation that requires heavy technology and processing power is the area of rendering. Rendering makes the models come alive and brings everything live. But rendering requires huge amount of processing, and performance is very critical. R&H use a shared processing environment wherein a daemon runs in every machine and utilizes the processor idle time for rendering and other process intensive work. The process sharing not only happens in their Los Angeles office but also the processors that are in their offshore office in Mumbai, India.

Another key information that grabbed my mind was that R&H use their own hand written code instead of using Maya for lot of visual composition and rendering. And using customized linux with source code allows them to tweak up until the kernel to suit their needs. It may not be long before there are lot of open source softwares like Blender coming up along digital animation and modelling arena.

I was fascinated by the processor sharing model. If Thomas Friedman wanted to write the next version of The World is Flat, probably he might want to call it "The World is Folding" and he might be adding this as one of the folds. The world is now folding by not just connecting people but also utilizing resources that is scattered across the world.

Mind Map is a fascinating technique that helps you tap your creative mind and put it into your daily use. Mind map can be used in a variety of areas and is not restricted to any specific category of individual or groups.

While the how to and the uses of mind map can be studied in the site above, the power of the tool can be only realized when it is practiced and made as a habit.

I had been using Mind Map technique since my school days and I thought that could be a good topic I can share with my fellow navigators. One of the question after the session was how can the logistics and implementation details be represented using mind maps. My answer to that question was that mind maps are starting point to tap in brains and bring up new ideas and thoughts. It is a powerful technique to dump the information in your brain on a particular context. Mind Maps are starting point to your solution to a problem and you have to pick and chose the right information and data that is necessary for you and start analysing and designing the logistics and implementation details.

The look and feel aspect of a web application is gaining more focus these days. Customers are requesting a rich user interface as a priority requirement. While we have identified our best practices to reduce work at the browser as much as possible and do the processing as much as possible on the server side (security demands it), it is not quite achievable when one of your primary requirements is to provide a rich user interface. While basic HTML or XHTML may help you satisfy certain look and feel requirements, a dynamic UI change and data changes in the UI controls demand that you go back to server, fetch the data and refresh your page. No wonder your performance will go for a toss as the number of hits to your site increases. The rich UI interface these days also demand applications similar to your desktop applications with the ability to drag and drop UI components within the page. A standard (X/D)HTML based applications will not help you in achieving this. What you need is an AJAX powered application.

Microsoft introduced what is called as XMLHTTPRequest to talk back with the server asynchronously and update the web page without refreshing the entire page. Of course as usual MS introduced it as an ActiveX object limiting it to browsers working on Windows operating systems. But then all the browsers followed implementing it. Now the XMLHTTPRequest component is available in almost all the latest browser versions. OK what works behind is simple. When the page loads a Javascript instantiates the XMLHTTPRequest object. This object has certain properties and methods that you can use to communicate to your server application asynchronously without submitting the page. You can get the response either in the form of a text or in XML and process it and change your UI data using Javascript.

The technique was old but it was revived with new freshness and has become an outburst. Now everyone wants Ajax. As you read this, you are already browsing an Ajax based web application. There are plenty of sites that have ajax examples, lot of forums. Whether you become rich or not applications are becoming rich.