My Blog

These are my summer vacation days. These days I feel scared to tune in to any of the news channels. I mean it. If you closely look at the recent news : - Fake / Expired medicines - Expired food products - Unprecedented corruption at Medical CI. - Dantewada : 70+ CRPF man killed - Yet another attack in the surrounding place in a Bus killing 30+ - Mangalore plane crash - 150+ killed - Attack / Sabotage on Train in WB - Killing 80+ (as I am keying this) All of these have happened within a short period. And they have all happened in our own country. And we are experts at playing the blame game.  And the above list is only a very small sample of whats happening all across the globe. All the religions unanimously declare that, "God is Love" - "Anbe Sivam" . With my limited understanding I am not able to find any love in the above mentioned events.  Every one of them killed would have a family. He/She might run a business. On that many families migh...

Hmm... I have Windows XP & 7 in my home PC. (Of course Ubuntu is also there).. Of late my XP had almost experienced the near-death scenario.  As usual initially system was becoming slow.. slower... slowest... Then it reached the next stage i.e. whenever I connected to net the system got rebooted automatically... System became totally un-responsive...  Then decided to go for an efficient(!!) anti virus.. Almost decided a brand to buy which costed ~Rs. 1600 for a three users license. Just before the purchase landed on to "Avast" anti virus site. They say it is free for "home users"... As said in the first line itself  the problem was on my home pc.. so I am a home user... ha ha ... Downloaded & Installed "avast" free edition.. Made the complete scan of my machine... it has 320 GB hard disk. To my surprise it completed scanning within 45 mins or so (more than 2.5 lakhs files) ... I expected much higher than this... It was t...

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...

To make it one word "Wonderful"  is the right adjective to describe this book. Pallavi Iyer's (   Smoke and Mirros: An Experience of China )   flow of the book seems to be very nice.. (Though I  read the tamil translation by Raman Raja). "What do we know about China?... Nothing" is one of the few catchy lines in the first page of the book. China has been a black box for majority of us here. The book is not a simple travelogue. You can really get a feel of China by reading this book. Few things that attracted me: How controlled is China. Strict reciprocal to India. Chinese language has no characters to represent foreign names. Even names have to be "translated" to Chinese to represent. Demolishing most of the structures in Beijing for the Olympics (without any opposition) ... Think of the scenario here where even the smallest of smallest roadside temple demolition would raise lots of criticism.  Internal Passport mechanism to control the...

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 ...

Today life depends on Gadgets / Appliances. For some it would be few... For others they are many. Few are essential. Others are luxurious / fancy. The case with essential gadgets is different. But what about fancy gadgets? This post is about A/C : Air-Conditioner. Of-late, many of us have become accustomed to living in A/C environment. You might raise an objection that A/C is not a fancy gadget. Whether something is fancy or not truly depends on the society that you live in. In a society of ours, where people are not getting electricity for irrigation, where mandatory power-cuts have become order-of-the-day, where students studying for their exams need to struggle with constant power cuts etc., the decision of treating A/C luxury or not is left up to you. For me it is for sure. A 1000 Watts appliance running for an hour would consume 1 Kilo Watts of power.  Even a 1 ton A/C would consume more than 1000 Watts. Calculate the power consumption for days / nigh...

It was a summer day. Hot & Sunny morning, 10:30 AM. I was waiting, for my friend @ Anna Salai, Pondicherry (Thanks to very few living trees @ Anna Salai). Within couple of minutes I noticed that many elderly couples were there with few covers / bags in their hands. The purpose of their visit was to a bank near by. ~95% of them were struggling to manage the steps @ that bank's branch. I had a closer look at those steps. Horrible is the right adjective to describe the status.... It was not clean... Corners of many of the steps were broken... damaged.. Initially thought there are only 4 or 5 steps .. then i realized that the bank is operating in the first floor... There was no support to climb on those stairs. First few of them were big.. and then smaller... Unevenly sized... Those who managed climbing these stairs were finding it very difficult to come down.. Even noticed one using a nebulizer...I guess these senior citizens have to manage with this bank atleast once in a mon...

Thought of listing the places from where my blog got hits during March 2010. The countries from where hits came from are : India United States Germany Republic of Korea Malaysia Pakistan Turkey United Arab Emirates etc... I understand that these are IP based identification. (So there is a chance of difference from the actual) Nevertheless thought of listing the cities from where i got traffic in March 2010. Thanks to all the Buzz friends who kept on commenting all the entries that I made. 

The announcement of GSoc 2010: "Google Summer of Code  (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period.  Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through  Google Summer of Code , accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.  In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released...

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...