Way of future

Technology is scaling heights and it can find its use in the wierdest of ways. Here's one:

What does one do, when there's no mirror..

Yup.. webcamera to the rescue!!

You can laugh at it, but this is the way of future ;)

Arpit.

Intellisense

IntelliSense™ is a feature which was introduced and popularized by the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment. It involves a form of autocomplete for variable names, functions and member functions (for C++ classes). Using IntelliSense is a convenient way to access descriptions of functions, particularly their parameter lists. It allows significantly faster software development by easing the amount of keyboard input required. It also allows less reference to external documentation as documentation on many functions appears with the function name.

The feature works by accessing an automatically genereated database of classes and variable names. As the user begins typing a variable or function name (which the IDE determines by context), IntelliSense starts suggesting completions with a pop-up window containing a variable or function name. The user can either accept the suggestion by pressing or continue typing the name. Eventually IntelliSense will determine exactly which variable or function the user desires, given enough information. The feature also allows the user to select from a number of overloaded functions for object oriented programming. IntelliSense can also display a short description of a function in the pop-up window.

for example:

class A {
void sample();
void innovate();
}

class B extends A {
A obj = new A();
obj. //pop up menu comes up, which displays list of suggested methods,
hence user need not type it all

What promted me to write this post was that we use this feature every now and then but don't know that a term exists for it. 'Intellisense'.. interesting!

"Google Dance"

No two thoughts about it: Google is smart!
Instead of running aways from their enemies, they try to work with them. Strange it may sound, but this what happened recently at Googleplex, where they had their annual summer bash called "Google Dance". Behind the scenes, it was actually rendezvous between cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge with Google's top notch engineers.

For the millions of websites without a well-known domain name, rankings can mean the difference between success or failure because Google's search engine drives so much of the internet's traffic. Being on the first page of Google's result is almost like gold.With so much at stake, low-ranked websites spend much time and money trying to elevate their standing, even if they must resort to deception. The tactics include "keyword stuffing" -- peppering a web page with phrases associated with a specific topic such as "laptop computers" in hopes of duping the software "spiders" that troll the internet to feed Google's growing search index. It's a risky strategy because Google and other search engines penalize websites that get caught gratuitously repeating the same word. In the worst cases, the offending websites are deleted from the index so they don't show up in search results at all.

Sometimes webmasters collude to populate their sites with a large number of incoming links from other sites. This approach makes a site appear more authoritative and popular than it really is and thus rise in rankings. Such dirty tricks pollute the search results with websites that have little to do with a user's request, frustrating consumers, diminishing Google's credibility and threatening to undermine the company's profits by driving users to its rivals.

Not surprisingly, Google works hard to thwart the mischief makers, sometimes branded as Black Hats because of their subterfuge. Engineers frequently tweak the algorithms that determine the rankings, sometimes causing websites perched at the top to fall a few notches or, worse, even plunge to the back pages of the results.

Hoping to ease the tensions with webmasters, Google hatched the idea of its "dance" party during an annual search engine convention held in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from Google's headquarters. The company invited some of the Black Hats, effectively welcoming the foxes into the hen house. "Google realized it was never going to get rid of these (Black Hats), so it decided it may as well work with them," Chris Winfield, a Google Dance party veteran who runs 10e20, a search engine marketing firm. "Until then, it always seemed like it was 'us against them.'"

Google knows it can't entirely avoid Black Hats, so its finding ways to subside their effect!

| Wired News

What is Eclipse?

Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology.

Eclipse has formed an independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples.

The Eclipse Platform is a fresh start at an open integrated development environment (IDE) system with broad commercial participation. While classic tools like Emacs and others have supported the development needs of developers worldwide, most lacked the advanced features and convenience of GUI based IDEs, as well as an easily extensible nature, available in commercial tools. With over 1200 developers from 63 countries involved in the Eclipse open source community process and with more than 150 leading software tools vendors working with it, Eclipse stands a chance to change that entirely.

Eclipse is the basis of IBM's next generation of Websphere Studio products, which is a suite of tools that encompasses all of your development needs -- Web development, enterprise-scale application development, and development for wireless devices. The Studio tools run on top of WebSphere Studio Workbench, an open, extensible, tool integration platform that lets tool builders seamlessly integrate tools and application resources across the development lifecycle. The Workbench is the foundation for IBM's next generation of application development tools.

For more information on Eclipse, click here.

Sudoku

Sudoku which has taken the world by storm has become one of my latest infatuation. Sudoku is a simple game of logic, in which the objective is to complete the grid such that every row, every column, and every 3x3 block contains the digits from 1 to 9. Simple as it sounds, but comes in variety of difficulty levels and each puzzle is enticing in its own way and has something to offer which simply makes it an addiction!

Here's an interesting article about history of Sudoku:

The concept of Sudoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku) seems to begin with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler who in 1783 invented Latin Squares - NxN grids which have all numbers from 1 to N appearing exactly once in each row and column. Because Euler used Greek letters, these grids were often called “Graeco-Latin Squares”. Sudoku puzzles as we know them were first published in the late 1970’s in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine by Dell Magazines. The name given by Dell to these puzzles was Number Place, as they are still called by this company until today. Dell took Euler’s Latin Square concept and applied it to a 9x9 grid with the addition of nine 3x3 sub-grids, or boxes, each containing all numbers from 1 to 9.

So, the Sudoku concept was not invented in Japan as many people may believe, but the name Sudoku was. In 1984 Nikoli, Japan’s leading puzzle creating company, discovered Dell’s Number Place and decided to present them to their Japanese puzzle fans. The puzzles, which were first named Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru, ("the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once") quickly became popular. In 1986, after some important improvements were added, mainly by making symmetrical patterns and reducing the number of given clues, Sudoku became one of the best selling puzzles in Japan. Realizing that the only problem with the Sudoku puzzles was their long name, Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli abbreviated it to Sudoku - (Su = number, digit; Doku = single, unmarried). Today there are more than 600,000 copies of Sudoku magazines published solely in Japan every month.

At the end of 2004 Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge as well as a puzzle fan and a computer programmer, visited London trying to convince the editors of The Times to publish Sudoku puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates Sudoku puzzles of different difficulty levels, demanded no money for the puzzles. The Times decided to give it a try and on November 12, 2004 launched their first Sudoku puzzle. The publishing of Sudoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand. Three days later The Daily Mail began publishing Sudoku puzzles titled as "Codenumber". The Daily Telegraph of Sydney followed on 20 May 2005. By the end of May 2005 the puzzle was regularly published in many national newspapers in the UK, including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun and The Daily Mirror. <>But that was not it. In July 2005 Channel 4 included a daily Sudoku game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the world's largest Sudoku puzzle – a 275 foot (84 meter) square puzzle, carved in the side of a hill in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol. The BBC Radio 4's Today began reading numbers aloud in the first Sudoku radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brother's Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do Sudoku is the best-selling book in the country, have testified to its benefits as a mental workout. Even the Teachers magazine which is backed by the government recommended Sudoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that Sudoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer's.In April 2005 Sudoku completed a full circle and arrived back to Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the Sudoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched Sudoku puzzles on the same day. In both cases the Sudoku puzzles were instead of traditional crosswords and bridge columns.

Today there are Sudoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, competitions and even a Sudoku game show. Sudoku has also sprung up in newspapers all over the world and is commonly described in the world media as "the Rubik's cube of the 21st century" and as the "fastest growing puzzle in the world".

For some Sudoku strategies, click here.

Arpit.

Open GL

OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. OpenGL fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across all popular desktop and workstation platforms, ensuring wide application deployment.

Different areas where the aforesaid capabilities are used include markets such as broadcasting, CAD/CAM/CAE, entertainment, medical imaging, and virtual reality to produce and display incredibly compelling 2D and 3D graphics.

Some of the developer driven advantages are:

• Industry standard
  An independent consortium, the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, guides the OpenGL specification. With broad industry support, OpenGL is the only truly open, vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard.

• Stable
  OpenGL implementations have been available for more than seven years on a wide variety of platforms. Additions to the specification are well controlled, and proposed updates are announced in time for developers to adopt changes. Backward compatibility requirements ensure that existing applications do not become obsolete.

• Reliable and portable
  All OpenGL applications produce consistent visual display results on any OpenGL API-compliant hardware, regardless of operating system or windowing system.

• Evolving
  Because of its thorough and forward-looking design, OpenGL allows new hardware innovations to be accessible through the API via the OpenGL extension mechanism. In this way, innovations appear in the API in a timely fashion, letting application developers and hardware vendors incorporate new features into their normal product release cycles.

• Scalable
  OpenGL API-based applications can run on systems ranging from consumer electronics to PCs, workstations, and supercomputers. As a result, applications can scale to any class of machine that the developer chooses to target.

• Easy to use
  OpenGL is well structured with an intuitive design and logical commands. Efficient OpenGL routines typically result in applications with fewer lines of code than those that make up programs generated using other graphics libraries or packages. In addition, OpenGL drivers encapsulate information about the underlying hardware, freeing the application developer from having to design for specific hardware features.

OpenGL runs on every major operating system including Mac OS, OS/2, UNIX, Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, OPENStep, and BeOS; it also works with every major windowing system, including Win32, MacOS, Presentation Manager, and X-Window System. OpenGL is callable from Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Perl and Java and offers complete independence from network protocols and topologies.

For more details on Open GL, click here

Don't confuse web design with sex

Interesting headline.. eh? Well it was this very headline which prompted me to go through the content of the article written by Vincent Flander, Usability Guru. After completing the article, I kind of related to the analogy and soon realized the power of this headline which may seem absurd on first look. Anyone minutely interested in web design MUST go through this article and will soon realize how we ourselves make life difficult for users.

• Don't confuse web design with sex

Sex is the one thing everybody understands -- to a certain extent -- and that makes it easier to make analogies. I've tried many ways to convey a simple message and sometimes I feel the message is not getting through. Maybe a sexual analogy will work. This topic does not revolve around personal sites or other sites that aren't accountable -- movie sites, band sites, art sites, web logs, etc. I talk about sites where the focus is making money or disseminating information. It's my opinion that web designers are confusing the web world with the real world. In the real world, foreplay is mandatory. You have to set the mood, you have to be gentle, you have to entice. Fine. But in the world of the web there's no place for foreplay. It's not necessary. It gets in the way. To put it bluntly, the web is "Wham. Bam. Thank you Ma'am." People don't need to be enticed or put in the mood when they visit your site. They're there for a particular reason and the sooner you give them what they came looking for, the better. They don't need Splash pages, Flash pages, Mystery Meat Navigation, or whatever silliness you think will put them "in the mood." They want what they want NOW. "Give me your information. Sell me your product. Thank you, ma'am." (There is an exception to this "rule." Certain non-profit organizations can effectively use Splash pages to get potential donors "in the mood."

One line from a Pointer Sisters (I believe) song went something like "I want a man with the slow hands." Can you imagine the following line about a web site -- "I want a page with the slow load"? Not really because web design is about giving people what they want as quickly as possible in a way that they'll buy your product, your service, or contribute to your cause. (Some non-profits may be an exception -- some mood setting may be necessary. You should know the difference.)
Just as we've all been told not to confuse love with sex, we should also remember not to confuse web design with sex. Web design is about making money for the designer and, more importantly, the client.

This article is also available here.

-Arpit-