Inception

This is my first review on a book and I am not a happy man, writing for one of my favourite authors. John Grisham is  a very well respected and one of the top selling authors. His past works have always raised the bar for more. I was so keenly waiting for his next release when I heard about Confession. Trust me even a $50 price tag did not dether me from buying this Hot Priced book. Walking out a happy man from Whitcoulls, I knew I was going to be on a roller coaster ride of a mystery that will keep me enthralled for the coming few days.

Working my way through the first few chapters, really got the avid reader inside me all inspired. Not the one to keep this book down I began marching through the pages looking for the ultimate pursuit of legal hystericals. My pulse was racing high and the excitement over whelming. I must commend the way John introduces his characters and the stage he set up for opening the book.

But after the first few chapters, I struggled to push myself to read more. What? What happened to the most awaited book?

Well to confess I felt cheated and a breach of trust after having run through the half of the book. The journey after that was boring and slow paced with the same shit being repeated over and over again. Things were too elobrated and very minor details made the reading even more difficult. Random introduction of characters with no real relevance to the subject got me all the more worked up. From a legal expert like John I was expecting more to happen in the court and not outside, but sadly the book does not give equal amount of importance as it has done for the characters. I felt that a 440 page could have been easily accomodated into less then 250-300 pages.

The plot was good but with a little twist it could have been made even more better. This one gets only 2 out of 5.

As a loyal customer, I am still counting on you to deliver better results and eagerly awaiting your next release.

There has been a lot of tweeting off late where people have been claiming that Gmail works slower then a snail. I am surprised by these claims because not for a iota of a moment have I ever felt over my last 7 years of usage that Gmail has stopped performing.

Gmail is a beast and can handle large mail boxes with the ease of a panther. I have not seen a faster performing mailing system that helps you search through thousands of mails in a matter of a second (may be even less). I am not over exegeruating here and bet there are a million other users who can vouch with me on the same. There a tens of other features that makes Gmail a pleasure working with.

The purpose of this post is not to sell Gmail but to understand how it works, which in turn will help us understand why the chances of it running slow is merely a myth You’ve probably noticed that Gmail’s interface is extremely fast when compared to other web-based email systems like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. This is a result of Gmail’s placement of the UI engine on the client-side as a JavaScript module. Whenever you log in to Gmail, a copy of the UI engine is loaded into one of the HTML page frames and remains there for the duration of your session. Subsequent actions from the Gmail interface are then routed through the Gmail UI engine in your browser, which in turn makes HTTP requests to the Gmail server, interprets the DataPack and updates the UI dynamically. In contrast, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail follow traditional web application models and reload the entire UI after almost every action.

The item most relevant to this project is what I refer to as the “DataPack”, a base HTML file that contains only JavaScript array declarations that the UI engine parses and then uses to determine what to update. The advantages of this should be immediately obvious: reduced traffic load, and increased functionality — especially for developers who no longer have to resort to crude “screen scraping” techniques to interface with web applications. Although the ideal situation for external developers would be an XML-based DataPack, the JavaScript version is sufficient (and I suspect it was chosen for performance reasons as well).

So mongers who have been crying foul about the performance bet you have not understood the technical working before airing your views. There can be ample of reasons for the gmail not working on your machine, including reccent browser changes to latency on your net connecttion. A quick test of your account on a second machine or a different internet connection will help you get to the bottom of this mystery instead of raking up a issue that does not exist.

Systems like Gmail have performance monitoring tools constantly checking on performance benchmarks to see that the application works at its best. With stringent KPI’s a very minor drop in performance will be flagged off as a high priority issue. I am sure Google must have some of the best system admins working hard to see that your every second spent on Gmail is worth it money.