Web

Microsoft's confusing online strategy

First there was msn.com, Microsoft’s first attempt to become a major online player. Users were told that this would become the one portal that they would need to go to for all their needs. At that time, it was a competition to portals like Netscape and AOL.

Then came along live.com..Microsoft’t second attempt to bring all it’s on-line properties into one place. And live had(s) some really good features (skydrive, sync, spaces). Esp the revamped hotmail, now called live mail. Life was good right..

No..Microsoft then decides to spend a couple hundred million dollars to launch and promote Bing, it’s new search engine.

So you might be wondering, where is the confusion!! msn.com is for content, live.com is for services and bing.com is the search engine. Makes sense right?? Well, for some reason, Microsoft decides to redirect anyone going to live.com (the site that was once promoted as the only home page you ever need to visit) to the bing site. What about average Joe, that just wants to get to his e-mail and goes to live.com? Well, he gets redirected to bing. And can he at least get a link to his old mail services from the bing home page? NO!! One would think that is common sense, but then I am not smarter than the marketing/product folks at Microsoft :). Or is this just a clever way to drive more traffic to bing to increase it’s exposure? I think that is the case. Take a look at the web ranking from Alexa, comparing bing to live.com and msn.com

Now, if you dig deeper into the clickstream data for bing.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com#clickstream), you will see that roughly 70% of the traffic originating from live.com is going back to live.com (p.s. : This is a back of the napkin calculation 🙂 ).

Let’s compare that to the all knowing Google God’s way of doing things? If you go to Google.com and click on More at the top you can see links to all the services Google offers. And if you do the same thing on Bing.com, you don’t get the big picture of what Microsoft can offer..

All I am asking Microsoft is to put a link to http://home.live.com (the home page for all live services) on Bing.

Also, it would help Microsoft to start backing up all those millions of dollars in ad money with real content in it’s search engine. I used “kudithipudi” (yes.. I am pretty selfish 😉 ) as a search term in the major search engines and here is the ranking by the number of results

October 28, 2009 by Rantings Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Travelocity down due to power outage..

Looks like Travelocity was down early today due to a power outage. Here is a screenshot of the site, right after they came up

According to Pingdom, the site was down for ~1 hour and 29 minutes. If they did come up at an alternate site, I personally think that is a pretty good response time. Running a high transaction web site (and one that is as complicated as Travelocity) is no easy feat and when you throw DR into the mix, it gets pretty nasty. The site is primarily hosted out of the EDS/Sabre/Travelocity datacenter in Tulsa, Okhlahoma.

May 22, 2009 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Google knows that I am Indian..

I logged into Gmail today and noticed this small icon on the left hand side of the rich editing option, a small icon showing the letter “a” in my native tounge (Telugu).. Me being the curious kind, clicked on it and found out that I can now compose e-mails in multiple Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu & Malyalam) by typing in English. Something that Google calls “transliteration“. Here are some screenshots of me using the feature

 

Screenshot of Gmail showing multiple language options..

Screenshot of Gmail showing multiple language options..

 

Screenshot of Telugu in Gmail

Screenshot of Telugu in Gmail

Pretty cool.. but scary too 🙂 that Google guessed I am Indian.

May 15, 2009 by Fun Rantings Uncategorized Web 0

HOW TO : Redirect default home page on Jboss

If you want to redirect the default home page on Jboss (which has links to the Jboss site and also the JMX Console), you can do it by editing the index.html file in

$JBOSS_HOME/server/$INSTANCE/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/ROOT.war.

The $INSTANCE is the mode you are running Jboss in (default, all, messaging etc).

May 14, 2009 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0

HOW TO : Setup SOCKS proxy using SSH/Putty and configure Pidgin to use SOCKS proxy

I ran into a challenge  recently, when I tried to connect to my IM services (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, GTalk) using Pidgin in a secured network. For some reason, the network administrator thought that he/she should make life hell for people trying to log into IM. I will have a whole new rant about companies trying to lock down networks thinking they are making the employees productive..

Here’s what I did to connect to my IM services.

  1. Configure Putty/SSH to act as a SOCKS proxy.
    • Most people might not be aware, but a typical SSH client can act as a SOCKS proxy. So I decided to leverage this functionality.
    • You will need access to a SSH server and Putty (Opensource Windows SSH client)
    • Launch Putty
    • Setup a new server connection profile. I used FREE_MY_IP as the profile name in this screen shot, but you can name it anything you want

    • Expand the SSH option in the left column and click on Tunnels
    • Choose any port higher than 1024 as source port (unless you are running some kind of server software on your workstation, it is safe to use any port above 8000) and enter the SSH server in the Destination field. Then choose the “Dynamic” option and click on Add.. the screen shot below shows the options I used

    • The tunnel will show up as below

    • Click on Open and establish the SSH tunnel
  2. Configure Pidgin (open source IM client) to use the SOCKS proxy
    • Launch Pidgin
    • Click on Tools -> Preferences in the menu
    • Click on the network tab
    • Choose SOCKS4 as the proxy type and enter localhost in the host field. In the port field enter the port you selected when setting up the tunnel in Putty.

  1. Connect to your IM services.. chat away and be unproductive 🙂
April 10, 2009 by HOWTO Networking Uncategorized Web Windows 7

Lessons of the Trade : Simple way to deter web scrapers

If your website is a target of web scrapers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_scraping), here’s a simple way to keep them on their toes..

Every few days (or weeks) make a small change to the web page format. The trick is to make the change in such a way so that your users do not notice it or are not annoyed by the change. Most of the simple scrapers use, screen scraping and this would confuse the hell out of them 🙂 and usually deters the most abusive ones. The smart ones would have approached you in the first place, requesting permission to scrape or get authorized for an interface.

March 16, 2009 by Technology Uncategorized Web 1

Tools of the trade : Postfix Configuration

Good link with information on configuring a custom transport link in Postfix. A transport link in a SMTP server is a way to define a communiction/delivery channel with particular settings. Example, you want all e-mails for a particular domain to be sent to a particular server at a particular time.

http://linuxnet.ca/postfix/dedicated_transport.html

In this particular link, the author shows the steps to configure a transport link for sending e-mails to servers/domains with high latency.

January 12, 2009 by Linux Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Visual outlook of Kudithipudi.org

I ran across an interesting app called Wordle, that the BBC news service, used to show a visual representation of all the words president Bush used in his state of Union speeches (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7813432.stm).

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) take text or a URL as input and automatically generates a visual representation of the text based on the number of times a term appears. Very cool application of Web 2.0  technology.

Here’s how this website looks after wordle analyzed it.

Wordle is a “toy” created by Jonathan Feinberg. Here is a good interview with him regdarding Wordle and how he created it (http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/d.compsci.can_i_have_a_wordle_with_you.html).

January 12, 2009 by Technology Uncategorized Web 0