27 Jan, 2010

Directiplex trashed with Laser Graffiti Tonight – Be there or Be Left out

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (8) Comments

A friend of mine sent me an AMAZING link on using Lasers to graffiti the entire surface of a building. Check the video here (embedded below) and images here

So – OBVIOUSLY – I called up these guys and asked them to Graffiti Directiplex and THEY ARE COMING TONIGHT. Starting 10:45pm, if you visit our offices, you be able to write / draw ANYTHING on the surface of our office building with lasers.

To share this on facebook or twitter you can use - ”Come and watch #directiplex get trashed using laser graffiti tonight - http://bit.ly/aNyKP0”

Feeling creative – be there -
Time: 10:45 pm
Venue: DirectiplexAddress: Check http://directi.com/about/offices

Feel free to call your friends / family etc to watch the show as our very own HQ becomes a canvas for creativity.

11 Jan, 2010

Notes on Kestrel – the open source twitter queue

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (4) Comments

Kestrel is a simplistic, high-performant, loosely ordered, reliable queue that twitter uses as the backbone of its messaging infrastructure. I spent sometime today morning studying it and here are my notes -

• Extremely small footprint (<2000 lines of scala code)
• JVM based (written in scala)
• Servers in a Kestrel cluster have no communication amongst one another. Clients simply pick a server at random for gets and puts. This results in a loose ordering of the messages which maybe quite ok for most messaging applications
• There is no replication
• While the queues are maintained entirely in memory, they are written to a journal file to prevent data-loss due to a server shutdown or failure (quite similar to redis)
• Supports a reliable read, where a client can fetch an item from the queue within an “open” and “close” block, and if the client disconnects before sending a “close” the item is re-enqueued
• NIO based using Apache MINA
• Supports item expiration

References

• Kestrel Home – http://github.com/robey/kestrel
• Kestrel Documentation - http://github.com/robey/kestrel/blob/master/docs/guide.md

11 Jan, 2010

The best programmers in the country battle it out at Directiplex

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (4) Comments

On January 10th 2010, we witnessed the awesomest programming teams from campuses all over India battle it out in person at our Mumbai headquarters of Directi. 639 teams of three each, had registered for the CodeChef Campus SnackDown to be crowned as the best coders in the country. The first round of the SnackDown took place on 21st November 2009. We then flew the top 7 teams from various corners of India to Mumbai to prove their mettle.

I was most excited with the results – the winning team comprised of the youngest programmers of the lot – three juniors in their 2nd and 3rd year at IIIT Hyderabad, who overtook their mentors and seniors and took the first place . You will find details about the winners and a recap of the events in the codechef blog post here