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சில நேரங்களில் எனக்கு ஒரு சந்தேகம் வருவதுண்டு, "திருக்குறள் ஒரே ஒரு மனிதரால் எழுதப்பட்ட நூல் தானா?" என்று. திருவள்ளுவர் வாழ்ந்தது இன்டர்நெட் இல்லாத காலம். (!!)ஏன் இதை குறிப்பிடுகிறேன் என்றால் "இத்துணை துறைகள் சார்ந்த அறிவை ஒரே ஒரு மனிதர் எந்த ஒரு தகவல் தொடர்பு கண்டுபிடிப்புகளும் இல்லாத காலத்தில் எப்படி பெற்றார்? ". ஒவ்வொரு முறையும் யாரோ ஒருவர் அவர் சார்ந்த துறை குறித்து திருவள்ளுவரை மேற்கோள் காட்டும் பொழுதும் எனக்கு மிகுந்த ஆச்சர்யமாகவும் , பிரமிப்பாகவும் இருக்கும்.  மென்பொருள் வடிவாக்கம் குறித்து திருக்குறள் கருத்துக்கள் ஏதேனும் ஒத்து வருமா என்று திருக்குறள் அதிகாரங்களை "முறைத்து" பார்த்துக்கொண்டிருந்த போது கண்ணில் பட்டது "வினைசெயல் வகை" என்ற அதிகாரம்.  இந்த அதிகாரத்தில் குறிப்பிட பட்டுள்ள குறள்களில் "வினை" என்பதை "மென்பொருள் வடிவாக்கம்" என்று எடுத்துக்கொண்டால் , சாப்ட்வேர் இன்ஜினியரிங் கொள்கைகளுடன் அவை ஒத்து போவதை உணரலாம் . எடுத்துக்காட்டாக : பொருள்கருவி காலம் வினையிடனொடு ஐந்தும்  இருள்தீர எண்ணிச் செயல். Do an ...

Announcement for June 2010 NET has come. Refer the following link: http://www.ugcnetonline.in/ The general perception about NET is that it is the second toughest examination next to civil services. Being the passport for entry in to the academia of higher education, the test need to be of that sort only.  This year there are few changes in the pattern of the test.  One of the welcome change is the facility to apply on-line.  Choice (50 out of 60) questions in Part I ( Of course this is there from Dec 2009) Have a clear look at the pattern of Paper III. I thought of listing few tips about clearing the NET (or so I feel): Don't lend your ears to those who say "It is impossible to clear the NET in first attempt". In fact it would be easier in the first time becoz you would be currently studying the papers.  There is no short-cut to this test (Unlike your so-called other tests conducted by corporates) Selection of Elective is the Key. Go for the ...

Stop guessing. This is not a chemistry post. Read furthur to know what is C3H5. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) marks the boundary between your actual data and the presentation. This clear-cut separation between data and presentation would make the maintenance of an application smoother. The recent addition to the CSS family is CSS 3. It provides  whole lot of new capabilities to the Web UI engineer. In one of the previous posts (RIA Re-Defined), I highlighted about HTML 5. CSS 3 is a very good friend of HTML 5. This C3H5 (Thats the title!. Just like that thought of this acronym. So it is my innovation...LOL) would change the way that we approach the Web UI. Few of the capabilities of CSS 3 are : Dynamic Media Management: You can specify different CSS for different sized monitors with lot of ease. Multiple Backgrounds. Photoshop like Text effects with simple CSS. Imaged Borders Ability to provide multi-column layout. HSL color support Voice Effects (Called aural CSS usin...

Thought of listing my dream IPL team Sachin Tendulkar   Mathew Hayden Virender Sehwag Jacques Kallis Suresh Raina M S Dhoni (W & C) Robin Uthappa Yosuf Pathan Muralidharan Shan Tait Zaher Khan Does this look like a balanced and all-round team? PS: The comic is created using Bitstrips .

Yet another milestone in Science. Scientist claim now that they can make a three dimensional object invisible. Isn't Sounds like Sci-Fi? Have look at the video. Listen to Prof. Michio Kaku explaining this thrilling innovation. Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com Thinking about the implications of this tech... Un-Imaginable...

Countless number of times I have indicated in my lectures that without Javascript knowledge, you are not a web developer. Similar to HTML which doesn't has any replacement, JavaScript has also become "THE" choice for programmers across all technological platforms like J2EE, LAMP & .NET etc. To make the life of developers easy there are many JavaScript frameworks. To name a few: Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, QooxDoo (still remember the struggles that our team had @ merc with this) etc.  Surely jQuery is not simply yet another JavaScript framework. jQuery fully satisfies its tagline "write less, do more" (thats what most of us want, right ?) . jQuery is distinct, powerful and cool with the following features: Open source Light weight (only ~68 kb) Extensibility through plug-ins (so you need not to be a Javascript pro to use it; can simply copy & paste the code... afterall "reusability" is the most important software enginnering princip...

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have made the web more interactive and cool. Apart from the jargon "AJAX" there are many more things to it. The predominantly used tools for making the web richer are: Flash JavaFX Adobe AIR  Microsoft's Silverlight etc., Though these tools make the web more powerful there is a bottom-line constraint of installing the plugins. How many time we face this problem of plugin not found?. (Particularly in Linux platform) Qn : So what is the solution?  Ans: HTML 5. HTML5 can redefine RIA to a greater extent. HTML5 provides tags for "video" etc. So if your browser can understand HTML5 then no need for any of the above plugins. The major advantages of this approach are: Web would become "open" with respect to RIA. All of the above said plugins are proprietary. We want web to be open. So it is better to use non-proprietary tools. (at least for client side if not all) Being the native code HTML5 would possibly be more opt...

How many hours of a day you spend on-line?  Do you some time feel that you are on-line for most of your active time.. Hang on, internet (web) surfing can become an addiction or even a disorder.  Hey, I am not saying this.. There are detailed surveys on it. If you feel that you are  obsessed  with internet it is right time you check the below site. And take the on-line test there to find out your internet usage (or addictive) level: http://www.netaddiction.com/index.php?option=com_bfquiz&view=onepage&catid=46&Itemid=106 Be true while taking the test. I took that test and answered all the questions true to best of my knowledge (seriously, believe me). You know what, my score is 31. Perfectly normal (at-least in their scale) Yet another proof for the Tamil saying : அளவுக்கு மிஞ்சினால் அமிர்தமும் நஞ்சு 

A sudden flash of thought.  The influence of toss is steeply increasing on the result of a cricket match (Particularly ODI & Test) . Why we need to go for a toss?. Instead of a toss we shall use the "Super Over"  . (If you don't know what a super over is then refer:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Over ).  The super over winning team captain can decide whether to go for bowling or batting.  The advantages of this method over toss are : No pure luck factor to decide the result of the match. Imaging every match starting with a super over.. That would be great bonanza for the spectators.  This would make the result of a cricket match decided purely on cricketing skills rather than on pure luck factors. Does this makes sense?

This is the fourth year for me at Department of Computer Science, Pondicherry University. The programmes for which I handle courses are Masters in Computer Science and Computer Applications. Though my area of specialization is Web Technology (or so i believe) , below is a list of few courses that I have handled successfully(!!). Visual Programming (Windows programming, VB, VC++ etc) Artificial Neural Networks Architecture of UNIX. Internet Programming and Web Technologies (my favourite one..) Information Technology Introduction to .NET Framework (C#) Programming in Java In the above list you would have observed, mostly the courses I run are programming based. Trying to transfer the "Gyan" that i got from Geeks in the industry to the students.. One common element of all of my lectures is the discussion about the current trends. The very core of my lectures is mostly regarding "keeping track of the happenings in the industry". I strongly feel that my role i...

Every year there would be ~ 6 students under my supervision for their final semester project. The students are from Masters programme in Computer Science and Computer Applications. This year too I have six students with me doing their project. Just thought of listing the project domains in this post. Web Search Mashup - A project on novel search result visualization. Semantic Search - A project associated with RDF , Jena  etc... Semantic Recommender System - A recommender system based on semantics!! Web Site Filtering using Artificial Neural Networks Web Services Mining Framework Online Image Processing tool... You might have noticed all these projects are on web platform.. The idea of giving these projects is to make the students familiar with SDLC and lastest Technologies...  Their implementation platforms are any of the following three : J2EE,  .NET & LAMP Lets see how good these projects shapes up...

"As We May Think" is a visionary article authored by Vannevar Bush. It was released during 1945. So you might think what is so special about an article published more than 60 years ago. Because most of us might have an opinion that computer science is a volatile subject i.e. a concept/theory which sounds valid today might not be so an year after (some times even days after). It may look correct at the peripheral level. If you have a deeper look in to the things, you might understand that only the representation and executions have been modified and the good old concepts remain the same. For example data structures like Stack , Queue etc.. If you take any programming language it's gonna be the same.Even for that matter, Ethernet is still the mostly used communication channel in most of the organization's Intranet. Coming back to "As We May Think", it provides an unbelievable vision that the author had during 1945. He speaks about "Memex" - a col...

Mashups are small web applications. Mashups provide new functionality by combining the existing services or by transformation of data. Here is an introductory video to mashups: There exist many mashup tools . To name a few: Google App Engine Yahoo Pipes etc Btw, this post is to make a note about AI Mashup Challenge 2010. For more information http://sites.google.com/a/fh-hannover.de/aimashup/ If some of my students are interested then we might also think of sending an entry... We have very less time... Lets us hope :)

Gratitude is my favourite restaurant in Pondy. It is not a big one but i like the taste of the food they serve over there.. I have been there more than a few times ... the reason being its clean ambience and "accessibility"... Went there with my brother J this saturday... with every successive visit their taste seems to be improving (or so i feel) My favourite items over there are egg roll and fruit salad... worth for each paisa you give... In addition to the taste of the food, their hospitality is really good... Guess its been run by bengali people .. Homely food...

" Go" is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.. Its not simply yet another programming language... Google explains why... In its Go FAQ, Google explains the main motivations behind the project: “No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends: - Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster. - Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation. - There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript. - Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages. - The emergence of m...

During the past one year or so i was in a discussion with my students regarding building (rather customizing) a Linux distro which would be tailor-made for our needs.. The below list are the set of sample features which we aimed at: * Booting the system like switching on the TV.. meaning to say it should have a boot time of ~0 Second... Looks more ambitious, right?.... But with current growth it might become true... * Every functionality would be browser based... so very less resources.... * Some specific academic related services incorporated in it... Yesterday in a discussion i mentioned to them "Google Chrome OS" is very much similar to what we discussed last year.... PS: Unfortunately we haven't yet started implemenation... Bcoz its not on the mainstream schedule...

I love to be challenged.. So I am ... Yes .. I agree that it is difficult to lead an "Ordinary" life with being challenged physically.. But it is a constraint only for an ordinary life not for some thing special.. Thought of listing few challenged persons whose achievements are phenomenal: American cyclist, Lance Armstrong , won the Tour de France cycle race seven times consecutively from 1999 to 2005 after suffering from cancer that damaged his brain and lungs. British pilot, Douglas Bader , established himself as a war hero and an ace flyer after losing both his legs in a plane crash. One of the world’s greatest music composers, Ludwig van Beethoven (known for his legendary composition “symphony”), composed music even after he became completely deaf in 1817. Sarah Bernhardt , a French actress, continued to act in movies after she lost a leg in 1914. Being blind did not prevent, Louis Braille , from inventing the Braille printing technique which uses raised dots to enable ...

Downloaded the latest Ubuntu version 10.04 today morning. Thanks to the campus net for its ultra fast speed. The "iso" was around 700meg. To my surprise it got downloaded in less than 4 minutes. The logo of ubuntu is changed with this version. Ubuntu-One was interesting. Ubuntu one is a free cloud storage provided by ubuntu. Tried using it after creating a login.. Seems to be a nice feature... with the early observations it looks simillar to Google Remote Drive ... Yet to explore completely...

Till from the early days I am a big fan of writer Sujatha. A true versatile writer. Works of writer Sujatha would make me free from all the day to day hassles. Frankly speaking, apart from Sujatha I haven't read much of others in Tamil. Recently I heard about the authour Era. Murugan இரா. முருகன். One of his works Moondru Viral is about the life of a Software engineer, depicted in a humorous manner. Many good comments were there.. Thought of buying the book in Pondicherry. Fortunately found it online in an online store http://nhm.in/shop/978-81-8368-073-8.html . I have made an order there today.. Eagerly waiting for the delivery of the book.. Would write more about மூன்று விரல் - Moondru Viral after reading it..

"What happend?" this is the question which I answered more than a few times today. This question was regarding my previous post on "Win 7".. I always advocate Linux to my students.. I can proudly say that most of students laptop/comp are running some or other Linux flavours. All these days they used to listen to my Linux propaganda.. So after reading the last post some of them got a doubt/question regarding this.. Here is my reply : Most of the courses that i teach are opensource techs.. So it becomes obvious that Linux becomes the default OS.. In that post itself i have indicated that it is no way a compromise formula.. I still prefer Linux over it.. Though a PC is running faster even after its got affected with virus, it is not an optimal situation. You take the scenario of Linux where there is ~0.0% virus. More than all of the above you would get a fair enough understanding of installation and configuration process if you do it in Linux... The case with Win is th...

Let me first clarify that I am an ardent Lover of Linux OS. Mostly my comp would be on Ubuntu. But recently I have started to spend much time on Win 7. Few things I noticed about Win 7 which I thought would be worth listing here: Its very light. Animations are far better than the previous versions. Many jazzy features like "Shake to close" etc.. Network management seems to be very easy. It's Fast.. Faster.... Fasssssterrr... Quick boot (atleast for my comp...less than 15 secs... 4 GB RAM, Core 2 Duo 3 GHz) Easy to use Drive Boost. One final point that might not sound technically good but any how: Today I scanned my pendrive(!!) and found more than 17 hundred Virusssssses on it.... You know what, this pendrive is which i normally use with my Win 7 machine.. So you can imagine the number of files attacked on the PC... But to my surprise there is not even a simple glitch in the speed of my system (so far) ... See, by any means i am not campaigning for PC virus.. With out an...

As you see in the image aardvark is for taping the knowledge of people in your network. It is a nice little idea. Aardvark will sit in your G-Chat so that you can directly type *any* question that you have in your mind. It will find out people who can answer this question and get the answer from them. So you can share your knowledge as well tap the knowledge of people across the globe.. Nice idea.. Started using it for the past 15 days or so.. So far So good... I have given a sample conversation that i had with people through aardvark. 7:49 PM me : Do you have any refrigerator odour removal tips? aardvark-g204 : Got it. Hint: Short questions like that don't often get answers. You can rephrase it by typing 'detail:' followed by a sentence. I'm looking for someone who knows about *refrigerator* now. (Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) 7:53 PM me : detail: I'm looking for someone who knows about refrigerator odour...