My Blog

An another nostalgic post.  "MicroIndians - The Complete Software Solutions" was the venture that we tried bravely and proudly during 2001. Let me  narrate the complete sequence of events: River Vaigai bisects my home town Paramakudi. I was associated with a training institute on the other side of the river Vaigai. The place is called Emaneswaram. There I got the intro of Mr.B (We used to call him Ji). Ji was (is) a textile designer. My home town is full of hand-looms. It was the bread and butter for my family too. Hand loom is a right mixture of science (engineering) and art.  Weaving sarees was the primary business there. In order to create designs in the Saree, we used to have  Jacquard machine and punched cards (the ancestors of present day computers). Converting the designs in to the form of punched card involves these steps: Graph generation of design Card Punch Marking.   The above steps are very tedious, laborious and time consuming. ...

If i make a blog post saying "today we conducted an exam" then most of you would laugh and think whats the big deal of conducting an exam in an university department.  But the change that we did here is that the exam was "on-line". This time around, we have conducted Part -A of the end-semester examinations online. This consisted of 20 questions in each subject and today's exam was of 100 questions.  The "experiment with truth" was conducted with the I year M.Sc students. Let me narrate the background story as well. Many weeks ago we decided that the Part -A of the end semester would be an online exam, as a step towards utilization of technology, reduction in the usage of paper there by following the green energy principles.  Kudos to the thoughts of Prof. RS. Every time I talk with him, the glimpses of IIT-D would emanate which I have found as a source of inspiration.  The hardware / software stack responsiblity was given to me by him i.e. I have...

" < minutes / > " : A new component in my regular "Internet Programming and Web Technologies" Lecture session. In each session 10 mins will be allocated to one student. He/she has to utilize that time to present a recent innovation/happening/event in the field of Web Technology. The idea is to enrich both the communication and technological updates of the students in a participative manner. Thought of recording it through digi cam. Need to execute in a professional way, the recording. An another decision that I have taken is to utilize the "Google Moderator" for publishing the class room queries and discussions. Have allocated one enthusiastic student for that purpose as coordinator. Well... Need to wait and watch how these things would shape-up. PS: The naming credit " < minutes / > " goes to Jayarathna Madharasan, an another enthusiastic student of IPWT class.

Well... May 2010.. We all agree the theory of evolution, still. And we do believe that we have six senses and therefore we are the most advanced form of creature. I would like to differ at this point.  A sudden thought, giving birth to this post.. (Would try to translate my mind-map in to English.. Lets see how much I would succeed) Note the title which is the compressed form of Plant + Planet. -> Pla(ne)t. As we all know the mother earth is shared by both plants and animals. (ya.. we, humans being the social animal!!!.. Joke of the millennium)..  Most of us looks at the plants like they are simpler systems than animals/ us. But if you think deeply, look at the power these plants have. They have the ability to "manufacture" their own food (recall your school botany class photosynthesis, chlorophyll etc.). What a magical power it is!!!! Though it has been taken for granted, think of a scenario if humans / animals also  get this po...

Imagine year 2020.  How would you be using your web? Somewhere I read this analogy: "the cars of early days mimicked ancient manual vehicles. Similarly the web of today mimic the books / newspapers / magazines of yesteryears".. then really how the web would be as the time progresses? Fascinating....  During the past 2 ~3  years webosphere has seen exciting new ideas. Blogs reaching the unprecedented capacity in terms of quantity and inclusiveness.. No need to explicitly mention about "Micro blogging" services like twitter , Google Buzz etc... Phenomenal growth .... Lets chart-out few possible web advaaaaaancements...(In my opinion:) "Web of Things" would occupy a major area of webosphere in the future..  Think about IP enabled Washing Machines, IP enabled Microwave ovens, Refrigerators.. all routing semantic content among them...  You might even get a oven/cooker which would suggest the possible recipes that you can make based on the ...

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?

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...

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...

Cricket is no exception to technology impacts. We have seen during the past decade how this sport has benefited (!) by introduction of technology. Continuing this trend, rather at a increased pace I wondered how cricket would be around 2015. These are simply the glimpses of my thoughts at this point in time: Smart Pitch Reader : Instead of manual pitch reports there would be specialized devices which would scan the pitch with various sensors for factors like moisture, hardness, soil type, grass length, grass orientation, wind direction & speed etc. The collected data would then be analysed with the help of data-mining techniques with the global database and the behaviour of pitch would be predicted with maximum possible accuracy levels. Smart Fielding Guide : Think of a situation when the captain is running out of ideas. He would be given a specialized device which would guide him to set the fielding. He might get spots in the ground illuminated (indicating fielder positions). ...