Whatever... [Deepak Alur's Blog]: Deepak Alur's Blog @ Sun

If not for Sun and Unix, I wouldn't be here, not in this country. Let me explain a bit. My first OS was a Unix System V while I was a student. Then, after graduating from my engineering school, I worked for a cool company in India (CMC Limited) for 6 years. During the early 90s, I saw a lot of my friends and colleagues move to the US. I was somewhat reluctant because I loved my job and did not want to move away from friends and family. Or maybe I was just picky. In those days, one of my passions was Unix internals. So after unsuccessfully trying to ship me off abroad, my managers realized there was one thing I wouldn't be able to resist a gig which would have me working on some Solaris stuff. So one day they called me and said, "Hey Deepak, there is an opening for a gig at Sun that might let you work on Solaris related stuff, do you want to go?" I was like, "Did you say Sun & Solaris? Heck! Yeah! ". Within a month I was in California with 200 borrowed dollars in my pocket.

When I reported to work i found out it all wasn't true. Yes, the gig was at Sun, but never mind that it was nowhere near anything Solaris. Fast forward 18 months and I transitioned to become a full-time Sun employee and had a fun 10 years of working in different roles and projects.

I still remember, back then, one of the huge reason and attraction to join Sun for me was being able to work with the smartest, intelligent and highly talented folks at Sun. That still holds today for anyone who is thinking of working at Sun. Sun has to simply be one of the best (if not the best) technology company to work for, and it is not an easy company to leave. But, I must say that now my first act at Sun is completed. As you know, I just completed 10 years of working at Sun in October 2005. I am very proud of reaching this milestone in my career . So, after a somewhat difficult process, I have decided to leave Sun and pursue other opportunities. I resigned from Sun on February 6th and tomorrow is my last day at Sun as an employee.

Over these years, I have met and worked with so many amazing folks at Sun that it is impossible to list the impact that each one of them have had on me. So I thank them all, where ever they are now.

My personal website will still be at www.deepakalur.com on which you will find my background and contact information. My new personal blog is at www.deepakalur.com/blog. This blog at Sun will be available as always but all my future postings will appear on my personal blog.

They went fast and furious. My years at Sun that is...
I just completed 10 years at Sun! I can't believe it, but I did receive this recognition certificate to prove it. Too many good things to write about all these years and rarely a dull moment to talk about. I recall when I joined Sun, my (senior) colleagues told me stories of meeting Scott McNealy in person when he used to meet 10 years @ Sun folks annually. And I remember thinking, "Man, you been here 10 years?". And look who is talking now... I guess nowadays there are just too many folks to make this a rare occasion for Scott to meet all 10 year oldies around here.
In any case, it was a great 10 years for me and all thanks goes to the people (both Sun and our customers) I have worked with (where ever they are now) to make it a very memorable 10 years in my career.
And, thank you Sun!

Hmmm...If Web 2.0 is nothing but read/write web as Hal Stern says it is, then I might as well disconnect my broadband and go back to reading good old fashioned printed material. At least, I know who the frick wrote and published that damn thing. Nicholas Carr points out some intersting muck about the amorality of Web 2.0 and you can see some examples of some of the mess created by good old human nature in the new Web 2.0. And then there is the news of tightening of the posting rules for Wikipedia, which is an often used example as a Web 2.0 site. If humans are going to be humans (a.k.a monkeys) and do their business good old fashioned way on the read/write Web 2.0, then this Web 2.0 will end up being a conglomeration of incoherrent, inconsistent, unreliable, uncorroborated bunch of crap. Or, the Web 2.0 will keep tightening up the rules until it is no longer the read/write web, which I think will be called Web 3.0. Or wait a minute, is that Web 1.0? Bah, Humbug!

Web2.0

OK. If you don't think this is cool, you ought to think again

Now, I am no datacenter expert, but do get the opportunity to work with some every now and then. With today's announcement, I wanted to see for myself what the fuss is all about. First I checked out the cool but brief technical chat between John Gage and Marc Tremblay, the Chief Architect of the new UltraSPARC T1 processor. I highly recommend spending 8 minutes to listen to these two guys talk about what's cool about UltraSPARC T1 (click on the "Technical Video". Anyway, while browsing around, one thing caught my eye: a cool Java application to simulate data center configuration by dragging and dropping different rack systems and to see for yourself what the impact of different configuration is on your data center in terms of space, power, cooling, throughput and of course the dollar cost. (Note to the simulator developers: You have to make this tool more visible, link to it from the sidebar on the main page). There is also a power calculator, but that is not as cool as the data center simulator.

Anyway, I just tried to build a data center out of the box and here is the comparative picture.

Now, that is cool! Go see for yourself.

PS: Spanish translations by AltaVista. [No hablo español. Deseo que lo hice.]

DataCenter Architecture UltraSPARC Microprocessor

I am deeply saddened to hear that John Vlissides passed away during thanksgiving after a long battle with an illness (see here and here). I had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting him once and only once at OOPSLA a couple of years ago. I now recall how I was struck by his modesty and friendliness. He was a great author, contributor and an overall very nice guy. He will greatly missed by the community.
Read anecdotes and memories and even share yours on WikiWikiWeb here (See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JohnVlissides).

GoF Patterns Software

Today, I presented on Sun SOA at our Software Summit attended by Sun and our partner folks. There were lots of comments and feedback on my presentation and there were some pretty good discussions.

A discussion touched upon the topic of SOA and Standards which I blogged about a while ago. On one of the slides, I was trying to address the confusion about SOA and Web Services by saying that SOA != WebServices, but that Web Services was the current popular implementation that seems to be gaining traction with our customers and the industry. And a few slides later I showed a picture (see image map below) to show how we were trying to grasp all the standards (approved, emerging, conflicting and so forth) mapped to different SOA aspects.

I might have confused my dear audience a little (can't blame them!), because on one hand I was saying that SOA != WebServices, and on the other hand most of the standards I was mapping to different SOA aspects were Web Services related. But the reality is that SOA today is being mostly viewed from a WebServices implementation perspective. What do you think?

PS: On the plus side, it was great to meet the John Clingan and other Sun bloggers in person.

SOA Software Standards WebServices

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. So, without much ado, here it is... having been with Java since the beginning, here is how I feel about it now.
And to justify with some concrete evidence, here is the page count from the Java In A Nutshell book that was one of my most beloved Java books in the last decade. Not anymore, the friggin book is 1252 pages!

• 1st Edition: 460 pages
• 2nd Edition: 628 pages
• 3rd Edition: 720 pages
• 4th Edition: 992 pages
• 5th Edition: 1252 pages

Hell, it should be renamed to "Java in a Coconut Shell". And I am just talking about core of Java here, not all the other extensions around it. Because there are spawns of Nutshell books like "Java Enterprise in a Nutshell" and what not.

PS: Apologies to those who came here looking for some philosophical/technical discussion about how I really feel about Java.

You must not miss what Captain Bray posted, here and here, to relate (in another way) to what I was trying to say in my previous post. Very funny, Captain Bray!
Humor WebServices Software Standards Specifications

One of the things I often hear about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), when compared to past architecture styles, is how it is based on industry standards and sets you free from all kinds of burdens related to integration and interoperability. But, just the mere number of standards and specifications that one has to consider when attempting to SOA is mind numbing. I happened to chance upon one of Thomas Erl's (I realized later he has many similar) websites called specifications.ws which shows a (stained-glass-like) mosaic of standards that can put you in a kind of a trance or even a coma if you are not careful. I do like his attempt at distinguishing first and second generation web services. Not only are there many many standards/specifications to consider, you also have to consider:

• Which ones are specifications (not yet standards) by one or more vendors?
• Which ones are specifications (not yet standards) submitted to standard bodies?
• Which ones are specifications ratified by the standard bodies as industry standards?
• Which ones (standards or specifications) overlap (some do) and which to choose / use in such cases?
• And worst of all, there is not a single place to go to for these standards!

On that last note, some of the several standard bodies you run into when investigating SOA standards are W3C, OASIS, DMTF, BPMI, WFMC, IETF, Liberty Alliance, to name a whew! And you will definitely not miss the WS-I effort underway to develop and publish interoperability profiles (not standards) based on accepted standards in the industry. (Note:WS-I is not a standards body.)

In reality there is not any holistic standard for SOA. And I seriously doubt there ever can be, will be such a holistic standard. Although there seems to be an effort underway at OASIS to create a SOA Reference Model, you won't learn much about how to do SOA and how all the standards relate in typical SOA environments.

Anyway, after reviewing several specifications and standards, I am exhausted. I am working on putting together a list of all relevant standards and specifications and will publish my take on all this sometime soon.

Meanwhile, if you have any words of wisdom, I am listening.

Posted a few more episodes of Dick@Work last night to lighten your friday. Enjoy!

• RIF - Magic 8 Ball style
• Jack Ass Hires

Cartoon Comic

It is encouraging to see James Gosling blog about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It is encouraging because:

1. We are not alone in this confusion about the overlaps and differences between all things in SOA.
2. Hey! It is James Gosling talking about SOA!

I agree with James that there is a camp that things SOA and OO are distinct camps. To me SOA is a goal and Object Orientation (Design/Programming/Modeling) is one of the fundamental ways to get there. SOA is the destination and the journey, and OO is the vehicle to get there in good shape. I say in good shape because you can still get there without using OO, but you might not be in as good of a shape as you would have if you had used OO.

For example, say you want to go from point A to point B and you have a choice between using different modes of transportation (car, bicycle, skateboard, Segway, on foot, etc.). Which one would you use? What? You want to know how far you are going? Ok. Let's say you are going to the next block to meet a neighbor. What do you use? What if you are going a few blocks to get a carton of milk from a neighborhood store? What if you are going the same few blocks but to get your groceries for the whole week? What if you are going a few hundred miles to visit your family? Would you use a skateboard or a Segway to travel a few hundred miles to visit your family? (Not unless you want to make a new world record). Now, would you choose to use the same mode of transportation for all of these? Of course not. [If you do, you need to go back to the beginning and read again until you get it right. ]

Why not think about SOA the same way? If SOA is the goal, the destination, and the journey, then which means (modeling, design, programming, language) would you choose to get there?

The following is an informal comparison of SO and OO and how things fall in or out of place:

To reiterate what James said, I quote him: "Proper OO structuring is always a good idea."
Great advice from the wise. I for one am going to follow it.

SOA OO Software Architecture Programming

Thanks to Richard for pointing this out. Being a long time Jakob Neilsen fan, I am happy to see him share his thoughts on blog usability.
I found it interesting that the #1 and #2 on the list is about the identity of the blog/blogger. I have ranted about anonymous blogging before, see this and this, so I am really glad that someone this issue get attention from someone who is an authority on usability.

Anyway, looks like I personally am guilty of #8 ("Mixing Topics"). But, I am not sure I can keep my blog focussed on one topic alone. I don't really feel like having multiple blogs and I do really want to write on several topics. That is why I named this blog "Whatever..." because I could not decide (still cannot) what the singular focus of this blog should be. So the question is if a blog is about personality or an idea/profession. If it is about the latter, then it is easier to keep the blog focussed to a single or related topics. Professionally speaking, I am passionate about software architecture, design, analysis, patterns, refactorings, programming and related stuff. So I have created these categories on my blog, which I hope will provide the necessary focus for the only 3 people across the world reading this blog anyway.

Blogging

Sorry could not resist capturing this experience by DHN... Based on true stories and personal experiences... Real identities not revealed to protect the guilty!

October 17: Dick@Work is moved to its own site: http://www.dickatwork.com

Cartoon Comic

Based on true stories and personal experiences... Real identities not revealed to protect the guilty!

October 17: Dick@Work is moved to its own site: http://www.dickatwork.com

Cartoon Comic

Look what we found in a parking lot all alone, hungry and tired....it was a kitten. My daughter looked at us for a moment, and before I could say anything, my wife and daughter had already picked that little kitty up in their arms. So, what was I going to say. But, I had one big worry and she was a 60 pound boxer called Ally, already at home. We had rescued Ally over two years ago and she has adjusted well to the family. But, one thing I have learnt about Ally is, she...um...well...is not fond of cats. Not, not, not! I have seen her chase the neighborhood cats around. But, too late to think about it.! Because turns out we are already on our way home because the little fella is hungry and meowing all the way. The girls even started brainstorming about a name for the kitten and had one by the time we arrived home. We get inside and immediately Ally is all agitated to see what we brought home. What the!!! Who the!!! But, Why! Oh, No!!!!!!

So for the last two days, we have been telling my daughter that the kitty is going to the shelter. But, everytime the topic comes up, her tears start flowing instantly and incessantly. She claims that the kitty was God's gift for her birthday this week. How can I argue? So, I don't know how, but we are keeping the little critter. His new name is Smokey. He eats, sleeps, plays...much to the annoyance of Ally. He loves my daughter's room, especially the cushion on her chair. But, worst of all, he makes a cute little mean scowl whenever he sees Ally and Ally just goes b-e-s-e-r-k. Well, now we have to work on getting them to be friends! What are the odds of that happening? Who knows.

I never thought I would have a cat living with us. Never, never, never. Well, that's life.

Life Pets Dogs Kitten

Dilbert Blogging

Looks like analysts can't help but keep coining terms to one up each other. Now Burton Group analysts are talking about Superplatform, which I quote from this article :

"The Burton Group defines the superplatform, an outgrowth of the middleware market, as a tightly integrated suite of products that provides a platform for enterprise computing."

I find this illuminating statement in that article:

"While scalability is still an issue for some organizations when choosing a superplatform, "less than 5%" will find Windows is not scalable enough."

Less than 5% ? What 5%? Don't you want to know how analysts come up with these numbers? Well, if you do, you might have to pay $ to get that information. Anyway, is it 5% of all enterprises? Or 5% of Fortune 500?

Want some more words of wisdom? Here goes:

"If you're Visa, and you process 8,000 transactions per second, you might have trouble. But if you're an insurance company, no problem."

Hmmm....

And finally the comment about Java portability not being important is somewhat twisted as one reader points out here.

"For several organizations, vendor lock-in is an important issue, but the portability benefits of choosing a Java platform become less as enterprise environments get more sophisticated and complex."

So, are you ready for your superplatform?

I confess I did not plan it this way, but this is how it ended up. I had asked a question a while ago whether I should buy a new bike or fix my old one? Anyway, I decided to remodel my bicycle instead of buying a new one even though I was pretty tempted to get a new one. But, I had a lot of fun making over my bike during the 2 weekends. Basically, I had to fix my old bike's brakes (cost me nothing to do it with the tools and parts I already had) and add a new saddle cover that cost me $15. To get rid of the old look, I spray painted the old bike with a bright yellow color (cost me $10 for the paints) for the frame and metallic black for the wheel rims. I then designed and ordered a new set of decals (vinyl strickers - cost me around $30!) to re-brand my old bike into my very own custom bike. So here is introducing my own brand - Coorg Mountain Bikes!
Instead of fixing my old bike, if I had gone out and bought a new bike, I am sure I would have spent atleast $250 if not more.

So what did I do with the money I saved? After my earlier posting, Hurricane Katrina has struck the country hard. We all have to do our little parts. So, I put the money not spent buying a new bike and then some more into good use to help the victims of Katrina. A lot more is needed, so please consider giving, if you haven't already. Please, Please, Please! I did it with a bike, you can do it with your bike or something else. Fix. Save. Donate.

[For the curious: Mercara is the capital of Coorg & what can I say about Caffeine other than I love coffee and we grow it well in Coorg.]

Life Bike Hurricane Katrina

Architecture and design quality is of utmost importance in any mission critical system. Yet how many times have you seen quality take a back seat to time to market and other factors that are deemed more important to the business. In current development scenarios, how many times have implemented solutions quickly and deployed them production without adequately ensuring scalability, performance, security and other qualities of service (QoS). And all this because it is more important to release on time than to release with quality. The business forces justify going live sooner than later at the cost of overall systemic quality.

Even though over the years, many approaches (Patterns, Idioms, Processes, Methodologies, etc.) have evolved to focus and improve system quality, we seldom find enough time or effort to adopt and implement these best practices. We find little or no time to research, educate and adopt them within our teams. As a result, for most development teams, quality becomes an afterthought in the development process. In some cases we rely on a few key individuals in the team to ensure the quality of implementations. This works well in small and highly skilled teams, but when the teams get large with members of varying skill levels, the technical leadership is burdened beyond their ability to ensure adherence and conformance to best practices. The quality of the system under development takes a spiral dive. Sometimes, we comfort ourselves thinking that we can refactor our system as and when we discover the deficiencies. I think we even kid ourselves that we can do so even after going live. And so, in our quest to meet fast evolving business needs, we wrongly rely on future refactoring to justify such quick and non-ideal implementations. Even if we know we will not have time to refactor, we go ahead any way and implement whatever solution we come up with that works at the moment. Because, that is what the project demands, right?

So what's the big deal? The big deal is that we pay a price! Sometimes a hefty one. When we find a defect in an implementation, we can find and fix it relatively easily if the defect is truly related to implementation and not architecture/design. But fixing a design problem, like you chose the wrong design or something central to the system, we can't really fix it that easily without ripping out the guts of the system.

So in theory, identifying and fixing defects early on is the least expensive approach. It might even be possible to contain the impact of such fixes if detected in this early stage. But, despite having known this fact over the years, little has been done in the industry to provide tools and solutions to help identify design and architectural defects early on in the development lifecycle. Thus, in practice, it becomes a difficult task. In any case, even if we successfully identify a design or architecture defect, but do it late in the development cycle, it becomes next to impossible to fix it. So most systems in this stage will go live despite the looming problems ahead, hoping to try to patch it up as they go on. And most likely, the patches are going to be cosmetic and external such as allocating more resources (hardware/personnel) instead of eliminating the core defect in the system.

So, don't phunk with architecture and design when you can pay a little more attention from the beginning and get it right.

[With sincere apologies to Black Eyed Peas for borrowing the term Phunk, which they make it sound so cool.]

Some references:

• Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List by Barry Boehm and Victor R Basili
• Return On Investment from Software Process Improvement by Thomas McGibbon

Software Architecture Design

Since my return from India, my six-year old has been asking me to go bike riding with her. She just got a new bike last week and is really excited to ride with me around our neighborhood. But, I have this really old mountain bike (approx 10 years old) that is kind of broke. So it has been in this corner gathering dust in my garage for the last few years. Cut the long story short, I have to decide whether to fix this bike or to buy a new one. I lean towards buying a new one. It sounds more exciting, a new mountain bike... these days they come with fancy dual suspensions, great frames, cool colors/design, and all that jazz!
So, should i get a new bike or fix my old one ?
Leave me a comment, and I will post an update story on what I end up doing...

August 26th: I think I will fix my old bike. I have some cool design ideas about how I can refactor my old bike. This is gonna be my weekend project this week. Will post an update next week.

Life Bike

I was on a month long trip to India. Hence the silence on my blog. Just got back during the weekend and still kind of jetlagged.

While in India, I spent most of my time in my most favorite place in the world called Coorg. I doubt if people outside India know about it, but it is somewhat well known in India, well at least in the southern states. Coorg is for me the most beautiful place in the world, words can't describe it. I grew up as a little kid in Coorg and have lots of memories and experiences that I will carry with me always. Coorg is also known as Kodagu and is a small but precious district in the state of Karnataka, India. Coorg is well known for many things, but prominently for its brave soldiers, bold and beautiful women, wild life, mountains, honey, cardamom, black pepper and most of all Coffee! Yes, we grow great Coffee in India! I don't care what anyone thinks, Coorg coffee is way better than Columbian!

PS: I have lots of pictures, but don't have time to sort them out right now. Here are three random pictures from my trip to give you an idea of the greenery and scenery. If I get time, I will share in the future. No promises.

Rich Burridge gives some very useful blogging tips. In one of the tips he points out how he embeds a image at the top of most of his postings. He uses a HTML table to do that. As you will see on my blog, I too provide images to most of my posts and I do not use tables. I prefer to just provide the HTML IMG tag at the beginning of the paragraph and use the "align" parameter to specify if the image should appear left or right and the text automatically wraps around the image. No Tables Required. So the blog post HTML to use an image looks like:

<IMG ALIGN="right" SRC="http://your_image_url_here">
Your blog post text/paragraphs go here...No HTML tables required.

If you want the image to show on the left side, use ALIGN="left" above.
For example, in this post, I show an image of a car and a building. My HTML for the blog entry looks like:

<IMG ALIGN="right" SRC="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/alur/AutoBuilding.gif">
What does architecture mean to you? Do you care about architecture? If not, should you care? ...

This reminds me that I have to update my other blogging tips related to Technorati pinging and tagging...My old tips still work, but Roller has introduced some new features that make this even easier. Oh, well, some other time.

My son pointed this out to me today about how much a war costs. It is mind boggling to think about this. Take a look for yourself. Source : costofwar.com

Astonishing ways the resources could have been alternatively spent: Paid for 23,570,077 children to attend a year of Head Start. Insured 106,559,360 children for one year. Hired 3,083,967 additional public school teachers for one year. Provided 8,626,826 students four-year scholarships at public universities. Built 1,602,311 additional housing units Fully funded global anti-hunger efforts for 7 years. Fully funded world-wide AIDS programs for 17 years. Ensured that every child in the world was given basic immunizations for 59 years.

Cost Click on image for details.

Life War Peace

What does architecture mean to you? Do you care about architecture? If not, should you care?

Depending on what you do, the term architecture signifies different things. And the fact that it is used as a verb (i.e. to architect) and a noun (i.e. this architecture) complicates things.

For instance, my civil engineering friends talk about building architecture. They might also talk similarly about building design. Now, consider my friends who work in automobile engineering. I hear them talk a about automobile design. But I don't hear any talk about automobile architecture. Why? What makes these two engineering kind different? And finally, consider software engineering in which I can claim some expertise, at least more than I can in any other engineering domain. In software, we talk a lot about both architecture and design. We also talk about software construction. Most often there is no clear delineation between these. We seem to transcend between architecture and design and sometimes even construction.

So when you build a building, you architect it, design it and construct it. When you build a car, do you just design it and construct it. Does a car have architecture?

I have some views on this, but before taking on them here, I truly want to understand your take on this. What do you think? Do you architect? Do you design? Do you do both?

Software Architecture Design

OK, chatting online cost me a lot of money this week. But, I am not complaining. I was looking for someone to help clean my rain gutters on my roof which are clogged with so much leaf debris, thanks to some pine trees in my yard. I searched on smartpages.com and found a number of listings around my area. Some listings had links to websites. One website caught my eye. This guy Doug, had listed his AOL IM (AIM) Id online right next to his email and phone numbers on his contact page. I pinged him and started chatting about all the job details, prices and scheduling. I was done in a few minutes of my time and gave him the job all over AIM. And then later we continue chatting, the guy starts talking about Sun and Solaris and AMD and Gateway and Dell. I was like, whoa, this ain't no ordinary gutter guy! This guy was an IT insider before he decided to do something totally different with his skills and start a new business.

I told him one of the reasons he got the job because he was on AIM. I think this guy has figured out how to use technology to gain more business. I wish more people like him adopted this as a customer service tool and published their AIM id along with their phone numbers in the yellow pages and websites. Some big online stores do that with a "Live Chat" feature. But, with the (increasing) ubiquity of internet connectivity it would be great if I can reach my plumber or my electrician or whoever with just a message on AIM. Ding Ding! Ka Ching!

Life AOL IM Chat

Richard Veryard (an analyst with CBDI Forum) responding to my earlier post has some interesting comments. I totally agree with what he says on vendors falsely posing as independent experts.

You can't hide (forever) in Blogosphere. So be honest and true, my friends.

Read Richard's interesting blog here. He also mentions a couple other analyst blogs in this entry.

Whenever you add a new entry in your blog, Roller does not yet automatically ping Technorati yet. There is a Roller feature to ping weblogs.com, but not Technorati. So now I manually ping Technorati. I have bookmarked the following URL:

http://www.technorati.com/ping.html?url=http://blogs.sun.com/alur  

You could do the same, except that instead of my blog's URL, replace it with your blogs URL, bookmark it and hit the bookmark anytime you make an update to your blog.

Technorati tags are cool. This link on Technorati site explains all about them. Here is how I tag my blog entries:

For each blog entry you make in Roller blog, I put a simple link at the end of the entry to categorize that post with one or more tags. For example to tag an entry with these 2 tags: Software, and Patterns, I just include the following HTML at the end of my post.

<A HREF="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Software" rel="tag">Software</A>
<A HREF="http://www.technorati.com/tag/Patterns" rel="tag">Patterns</A>

It's that easy! Give it a try and your entries will start showing up under Technorati tags soon. Make sure you ping Technorati everytime you make a new entry to your blog.

Here are some instructions to leverage the benefits of Technorati from your Blog:

1. Go to www.technorati.com and become a member.
2. Update your profile with the correct information and a picture (optional)
3. Once you become a member, claim your blog.
4. You will receive an email from technorati with instructions on updating your blog to include Technorati scripts and links so that it can be watched. The script looks something like:
   

   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://technorati.com/embed/9xyxyabcde.js"></script>

5. Include this script in your weblog. It will result in link to your Technorati profile being displayed in your blog where you put the script. I put this script in my side bar so it looks like the picture shown here. Take a look at my blog's sidebar to see what it looks like.

How to add Technorati Cosmos Link

I couldn't really add much to what Todd Fast and Pat Chanezon have said about this topic. So I will just include those two links here.

1. Todd Fast on How To Add Technorati Cosmos Links
2. Pat C's suggestions adding on to Todd's instructions

1. Download and upload the cosmos.gif to your blog
2. Edit your _day template and insert the following HTML lines at the end of the #foreach loop (i.e. just before the #end macro)
   

   #set ($permalink = "$absBaseURL$entry.permaLink")
   #set ($encodedpermalink = $utilities.encode($permalink))
   <a href='http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=${encodedpermalink}'>
   <img align='top' style='border:0px' alt='Technorati cosmos' src='${absBaseURL}/resources/${userName}/cosmos.gif'/></a>
   

Now isn't that easy?