MOINC - Yes. It Scales!

The MOINC gang was in high spirits after the successful completion of presentations and a fully set up demonstration of a MOINC deployment as part of our final year project evaluation. We were so overwhelmed by the way things went and we were certain that what we tried to achieve by coming up with the architectural prototype - MOINC was definitely going to drive future web services deployments big time!

With that highly ambitious perception, we wanted to try and press MOINC to its limits in a small environment within our control and actually see how scalable it can be. So, once the final year exams were over and before we set off on our industrial career paths, we thought to give it a shot using a number of computers from a lab of our department – the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), University of Moratuwa.

By the way, in case you are new to MOINC, in the most concise way I can put it, “it is an attempt to blend Web Services with Grid and Volunteer Computing concepts in order to make future Web Services deployments highly available and scalable while bringing the computing costs down and making use of unused computing power.” Hmm… I guess that covers it. :)

We got together on 13th March 2009 and managed to get access to the Advance Computing Laboratory of CSE which houses around 60 computers. In this phase our plan was to make as much as concurrent requests to a highly computationally intensive web service and see how the web services deployment can scale to cater the requests. We used a web service which performs an Insertion Sort on a collection of 75000 numbers.

We installed the MOINC Agent application on 20 computers in the lab, and ran the MOINC Server and service client on one laptop, the default WSAS node on another laptop and the URL repository and Server Manager on another laptop. The we gradually increased the number of concurrent requests and at the point of total failure to respond, we increased the grid size and restarted sending in requests in an increasing order.

The results were amazing, and turned out just the way we wanted!!! It was really electrifying for us to see the MOINC screen saver running on all monitors when the deployment was running on full capacity. We collected a set of statistics and will be coming up with a research paper about our working prototype pretty soon.

Check out what Hiranya has to say about our test session in his Tech Feast.

Here are few snaps of what happened on that day.

- MOINC Agents running...

- default WSAS node (running on my lappy ;))

- Just about to join the grid.

- 50% of the team. (L to R)Dinusha, Isuru, Rusiru, Aravinda (me) & Hiranya


Take a look at how scalability increases with the size of the grid.



My heartiest thanks go out to all the MOINC team members who turned up for the test and I would also like to thank Mrs. Vishaka Nanayakkara – Head, CSE and Mr. Ananda Fransiscu who is in charge of the Advance Computing Lab for all the support given to this test session.

MOINC has proven its capabilities, but this is not the end!

It has a long way to go. A VERY long way…! Oh yeah! ;)

Complimentary review of my portable pal…

The mobile phone market is a maze today. Finding the right phone to fit your needs has turned out to be a true gamble. After losing three phones within a couple of months, there came a point where I had to buy a phone and make it my next best buddy. I am very keen on the overall performance of a mobile phone and especially expect the audio playback quality to be of top quality since I am a little bit of a music junky on the move. In addition, I prefer to go for wacky and unconventional designs when it comes to tech stuff. Thinking of all that, I finally chose to buy a Sony Ericsson W550i on one fine day in October 2006. Being a phone of SE’s Walkman series, its music capabilities really swung it for me.

>>> Manufacturer's overview

As at now it has already been under my hard usage, and despite the fact that it has been tortured to its limit, it still continues to rock on!!! I don’t care what others have to say about this, but the performance is simply amazing considering the time which it was launched.

This was just the second walkman released by SE, and they have given it the wacky swivel action to reveal the keypad. I still enjoy it when people who get hold of my phone try to open it like a slide-up or flap phone since the usage is not obvious. Well, yeah. It is quite bad in terms of UI design principles. But, what the heck! I like it that way :)

Let me point out what is really awesome with this phone. The sound quality and bass enhanced by MegaBass^TM was simply amazing when used with the ear plug type earphones. No matter how old the phone is, it beats the hell out of the Nokia NSeries phones and even the ExpressMusic models. Specially in terms of bass. It is also noteworthy to mention the quality enhancement by Stereo Widening, which gives a real 3D feel. The W550i has a ‘music only’ mode of operation, which transforms it in to a pure walkman. So, if(when) I am to switch to another phone one day, I will still have this running in the music mode as my walkman :)

Next comes the battery. This houses a more robust Li-Po (Lithium Polymer) battery which was an innovative step taken during the time this was released replacing the Li-Ion batteries. It has amazing battery life and even today it can run for over three days after a full charge with my normal operations.

Display – totally cool. Most displays cannot be viewed under direct sunlight because they tend to turn dark. But, this has a reflective panel within it, which uses the sunlight itself to show the contents quite similar to having the backlight. Moreover, the display cover is scratch proof which still remains smooth and clean when the rest of the phone has been scratched and ‘bruised’ and looks like the surface of the planet Mercury at a distance.

Convenience never ends! This was one of the few phones which could be charged via USB by the time I got hold of it. I still remember the few times I charged my phone off my laptop while travelling home by bus coz I needed to notify my father to come pick me up. However, I have been mainly using this feature to annoy my friends using Nokia mobiles ;)

There are many other good things about it like the dedicated keypad lock toggle switch, stereo speakers, enhanced web browser inspired by the browsers on Symbian, VideoDJ, Remote Control, Java support etc which I’d not comment on simply coz I don’t want to make this too long. With all the good things it has to offer, there are definitely areas to improve. But, we mustn’t forget that we are paying nearly peanuts to get all these practical features from the W550i.

However, don’t get me wrong. I am not recommending anyone to buy this right now; simply because there are enough feature rich phones in the market, and this was a kind of a gracious review for the W550i for being with me throughout, and I don’t see the death of it anywhere in the near future ;)

Viva El W550i!!!

Nemesis Rox Onstage 2008 Finals...!

TNL Onstage - The premier hunt for unorthodox music of Sri Lanka, launched it's 9th season this year. As they say, "No other concert is ever produced to such an international standard in Sri Lanka and no other music event offers such an eclectic celebration of local talent. Onstage has seen rockers hit Britney one more time with an electric guitar, chant in bohemian honor long live the Freddy, and take the streets of Colombo to the Ghetto."

With prelimineries starting on 4th October, it had its semi finals on 8th and 15 November and the grand finals were held on 29th November at the Sri Lanka Exhibition & Convention Center (SLECC), Colombo. It was a magnificent event which broaught together the finest metalheads and new soloists of the country, and also which drew a vast majority of rock fans of the country. What's more? The unprecedented Chitral Somapala (Chity) with his 'Civilization One' made a guest performance and that totally rocked the house to its limits!

So, why am I blogging about Onstage? :)

Let's get to the real deal. Among the six bands which competed for the Onstage band of the Year title, was Nemesis, which had a rise form the ashes few months back after being stalled for a while. Led by my good friend Mackie (he likes to use Mackie Mathew as his tradename :) ) who is the Manager and Lead Guitarist of the band, Nemesis made a great come back and made it's way to the finals of TNL Onstage with a enormous fan base to cheer it through out the event. Rightfully, although playing as the last in the line up, Nemesis jammed up the strings n drums along with Myya's vocals and they conquered the first session of the competition leaving behind the Cadenced and Zilch at a distance and having a minor competition from the other three bands, namely Love Me Dead, The Rebels and Ethereal. Next it was the Acoustic round, and guess what they chose to play! The hallmark song of Chity himslef - 'nadee ganga tharanaye'! Amidst the cheer of the crowd, Myya's vocals filled the house while Mackie and Losh tortured the string of their guitars to bring the best of it. This was played also as a tribute to Chitty and at the end of this round eveyrone knew Nemesis is going to carry away the half a million worth audio equipment and many goodies.

Around 2.15 a.m. it was the moment of truth! the comperes started announcing the winners for the night. They started saying, "The most outstanding musician of onstage finals 2008... drumrole please...", and it was won by none other than our good old buddy Mackie himself!!! he seemed rather surprised to receive it; but we wern't surprised to see him receiving it ;) Anyway I guess after this, Mackie would surely be a chick-magnet as was 'foreseen' in the write-up I did one year back when Nemesis rose from the ashes ;)

Next was the ultimate moment where they announced the winners of the night after announcing The Rebels as the runners up. Amidst the drumrole as soon as the sound 'N' left the compere's mouth, the house burst to a roar of NE-ME-SIS, and there was Mackie, Losh, Myya and Sithija running up to the stage embracing each other with the joy of victory, to receive their awards!

Apart from Nemesis, I was also thrilled to see one of my Collegemates (Damian) also playing in The Rebels. Proud of you too bro!

It was an awesome night at an awesome event, and it was enhanced by the amazing achievement of my buddies! Proud of you guys and I'm sure you might be setting up the high end audio equipment you won, to jam up some really rockin' music in the days to come by. I also remember Losh saying "Sri lanka, we are gonna jump at your face" when I had a chat with them to do the write-up about Nemeis, and yes! You surely have done that this time!!!

As Mackie would like the crowd to yell, let me wind up with the cheer to Nemesis - NE-ME-SIS... NE-ME-SIS... NE-ME-SIS...!

Digsby - The new legend in multiprotocol IM

IM has probably become the most sought after communication medium in today’s internet driven communication paradigm. There has been a monopoly of IMs among MSN, Yahoo and GTalk along with their own client applications. However, by now the trend has been to go for multi-protcol IMs rather than having different clients running on your desktop which can be extremely cumbersome with all the switching in between them. It is true that when each IM provider comes up with its own client, it can come up with a set of features that are optimized for the underlying protocols, security implementations, QoS etc. However, if you look at these hallmark IM clients, you'd see that most of the features are just gimmicks rather than actually useful features. For an example, the yahoo messenger has a load of additional features, which would at times overwhelm the resources and affect availability of the basic feature - the chat. MSN Messenger and GTalk client are simpler on comparative terms. However according to my experience the GTalk client consumes a lot of resources compared to the domain of functionality it addresses. I really admire all the technology that is used behind these IMs, but the extensive richness itself devalues the experience of a layman user at times.

So, multiprotocol IMs! What are the options we have? Recently, Meebo has come forward as the dominant web based multiprotocol IM, and it stands as the lone wolf in that arena. In addition, in the standalone application series, Pidgin and Digsby have become prominent. So, I thought of sharing my experience on Digsby which has caught up hype quite recently.

Pidgin, which was born as 'Gaim' is currently leading the race in the multiprotocol IMs. However, Digsby is giving a good fight to it, mainly through its gimmicky equation, IM + E-mail + Social Networking = Digsby. So, additional features on a chat client! If I start favouring Digsby, you might say that I am contradicting what I mentioned earlier about other feature rich chat clients. However, Digsby is different. It has ensured to offer only the features that cover a specific domain. Chat is obviously the key feature, and in today's context, e-mail goes very closely with it. Probably that's why we have chat modules integrated to the web-based e-mail portals. And social networking is supported big time in today's world, and it is also all about communication. Therefore, Digsby seems a very effective all in one package as an IM client. Even the latest Pidgin also has facebook chat integrated. But, Digsby takes it to another different level by having updates, notifications etc from the Social Networking applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter.

On the face of the Buddy List, Digsby is nearly identical to pidgin apart from the difference images used here and there. Therefore, this interface ends up in rather a tie among Pidgin and Digsby. The listing of different IM accounts in a sequential manner and the sorting methods available in both are the same. However, Digsby has more advance sorting mechanisms which allows to sort in a multilevel filtering process. Digsby's buddy list generally stabilizes faster than Pidgin, and the customizability seems greater.

However, what really swings for me in Digsby is its simplicity in configuration. Pidgin's interface is rather tech oriented, and a generic user would get confused seeing the protocol preferences, server choices etc. Digsby also has these. But they are quite hidden under the hood and during the creation of an account only the username password combo is expected in the UI, which can turn out to be rather comfortable to a layman user who consequently would not have to waste time trying to figure out whether to ignore certain settings or not. Even the preferences are really simplistic with a traditional left navigation menu and relevant components opening in the right.

Another cool feature is the pop-up that appears on the screen for chats, mail updates and various notifications if Digsby is out of focus. This is very noticeable, and the chances of missing out on something even for a short while are minimized. Apart from that, you can reply on the pop-up itself. This can be extremely convenient if you are multitasking. In addition, the snapshot view of mails becomes highly handy to get a quick idea. The chat window is simple and has all the basic operations visible. Pidgin follows the Firefox extensibility style and is extended using plug-ins. This is an important feature, and Digsby does it by widgets. Moreover, the ability for Audio/Video chat puts Digsby in front of Pidgin in that aspect.

However, with all the might, it has some shortcomings. The most obvious one is the memory consumption. It is understandable with the feature set. But, still with GTalk and Yahoo chats logged in while Gmail is active, 25MB seems pretty expensive in terms of memory. Although it did not matter me much with my 2GB memory, it can be an issue and Pidgin can easily handle the above two IM accounts well under 15MB or memory in the same kind of test scenario. In addition, Digsby requires an account to be created upfront, and this central account has access to all the credentials of our accounts. Therefore, a security threat can be a possibility unless extra care is taken by the Digsby community. In addition, it does not provide support for some protocols supported by Pidgin such as IRC, Gadu Gadu, GroupWise, SILC etc. Since I installed Digsby, Firefox has crashed few times without even having the ability to restore. I wonder whether this is a direct consequence of Digsby. However, if it is, a patch better come out soon :) Apart from all these, still it does not have a native Linux version out yet, although they've announced that a Linux and Mac version will be coming soon. So, Pidgin is still going to keep ruling the Linux domain.

Simply put, my conclusion is, for a person who values convenience over other techy things like performance, extensibility etc, Digsby is the ultimate choice. With all due respect to Pidgin as the leading multiprotocol IM client, I believe Digsby will start a legend of its own.

MOINC - A new epoch of Web Services

Web Services has become the ultimate choice for modern organisations to harness the power of network based computing. However, the the original Web Services model faces two inherent shortcomings despite all the good things it has to offer. Firstly, the traditional implementation finds it hard to scale up with the rising number of service requests, and thus 'scalability' is at stake. Therefore, the service providers are forced to go for more hardware oriented solutions to facilitate high scalability, investing fortunes in most of the cases. In addition, when the requests overwhelm the service provider, he is forced to reject further requests. This results in the decline of 'availability'. Web Services and SOA have definitely created hype, and have already become dominating technologies in the enterprise arena. But, when scalability and availability are threatened, how is the paradigm of WS going to survive?

The answer lies in the field of distributed computing which also has become prominent and interesting technological breakthrough. Projects like SETI@Home, Folding@Home and middleware technologies like BOINC have become hallmark technologies in this respect, especially in the field of Volunteer Computing. Therefore, a novel idea is to integrate a touch of the above techniques to enhance the availability and scalability of Web Services by distributing the load subjected to Web Service geared service providers over a cluster of computers. This innovative idea was given by Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana, Chairman & CEO of WSO2, when we were in the quest for a problem to solve as our final year project of the Computer Science & Engineering course of the University of Moratuwa.


So, here we are! A group of ten comprising myself and nine of my friends at CSE are currently in the development stage of the platform which would solve the above two issues in the days to come by. Our project named MOINC (Mora Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) tries to give a solution by creating a cluster of computers made of volunteer computers which are connected to the World Wide Web, and distributing the load among all these nodes to get the processing done. Simply put, if things go well (which we are very keen to see happen :) ), a single application of this would give rise to a fully cranked up distributed super computer facilitating Web Services with high availability and scalability. The extremely generic nature of this project would give the users of this platform the capability to implement virtually any Web Services based application on top of it - even systems like SETI@Home.


The magic happens with the fine blend of the following four components.
- MOINC Server - The core component which is a self contained entity that manages the cluster, accept service requests, perform default WS processing etc.
- MOINC Client Agent - The component that will run in each and every node computer in the cluster, which will communicate with the Server and take care of all the activities in the node end.
- MOINC Server Manager - The component which gives a range of additional features to the MOINC platform for improved Quality of Service with features like credit management, trend analysis, social networking etc.
- Thisara Communication Framework - The Apache MINA based communication protocol which will be used for internal communications of the MOINC platform.


So, we claim that it solves two issues in the Web Service paradigm. But, the problem solving does not end there! This becomes a solution to make good use of idling computer power and electricity wasted during the time that computers are up and not doing any productive work. Hence, two birds are killed with one stone!


All the necessary information is available in the official project web site, and we have already done an alpha release of the Thisara Communication Framework. The source code can be checked out from our SVN repository as well. The team is high spirited, MOINC is rapidly progressing and the world of future Web Services seems a highly scalable and available place :)

Google Chrome - A re-thinking of the browser

When I heard that Google was about to launch their own browser, I definitely knew that they had something really cool, wacky and BIG in store for the world.But,it was only after I got hold of Google Chrome and tried it out that I realized how the traditional browser design could be revolutionized!

On the phase of it, it looks as if it is yet a Firefox underneath, but that is a mistake. The Chrome team has entirely built the browser from scratch with a host of performance enhancing steps. The main issue we had with our traditional browsers was the fact that the browser ran as one process in the Operating System and different threads handles the irrationalities. So, even with all the management, the user always had the risk of crashing the browser if something went wrong. This became more evident with the tabbed browsing approach since multiple web pages appeared under tabs in the same browser window. So, if a page got hanged in one tab, or got crashed, it was time to say 'good bye' to all the tabs and start from the beginning. Still it was a load of inconvenience despite the fact that there were recovery measures taken.

However, with the rethinking with the Chrome browser, they have taken things to another level by making each tab act as a separate process in the OS. When the browser starts up, it starts up two processes which I believe correspond to the parent process which done all the administrative tasks and the one corresponding to the active tab. Thereafter with each tab creation, you can see a new process being created. With this approach, the resource utilization is independent among tabs since they are now processes. So, at the worst case, only one tab would crash and vanish while the rest of the tabs will be 'merrily singing along'. This is just one major optimization in terms of the browser design.

In addition, what main swings it for me is the amazingly simple interface with just seven utility buttons, tab list and 'omnibox' which gives a nearly full screen view of a traditional browser.

The good stuff;

- Fully Open Source
- Chrome's own Task Manager
- A VM for Javascript
- 'Omnibox' for URL entry, suggestions and searching.
- Sandboxing for security
- Separate plugin processes
- Gears

The 'Google Book' which contains all the design decisions can be found here, and this is the most awesome technical walk through I saw after the 'Head First' series.It's just a simple comic book at a glance and yet has all the technicalities associated with this wonderful browser. So, it's time you spend some time and go through the Chrome Google Book if you haven't done alreadys :)

This link contains some cool tips to harness a considerable potential of Chrome. With all the breakthroughs, there seems t0o be room for some more improvements. Check it out...

The web is sure to be flooded with tricks and spins related to Chrome in the days to come by, and the browser market is sure to be full of hustle and bustle...

Glory all the way

"The University of Moratuwa (UoM) ranked as the best University of the country, and the 11th best University in the South Asian region, has made yet another significant achievement in the international arena, to add to its glamour.

The caliber of its students enabled the University to top the participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008 (GSoC 2008) programme, both in terms of proposal submission and acceptance of proposals among all participating Universities...."

...and the story goes on. My University became the global top in the GSOC2008 venture, and man!!! Am I not thilled of that?! So, I felt that it was my duty to do my part as a student of UoM, CSE and also a freelance writer, and did quite a comprehensive write up to the 'Sunday Observer', the State English Newspaper regarding this achievement.

>> http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2008/06/08/plus02.asp

And what's more? Right now the article appears as the first hit in Google for the search key 'GSOC UOM'!!! Now, shouldn't I be elated?!

I'm truly proud of all my buddies who became proud partners in this achievements, and quite happy about me for raising the application count from 89 to 90 though I could not contribute to add one to the 24 successful application count :)

Anyway, simply put UoM and CSE would rock forever!!!