Executable Internet or XInternet

Read George F. Colony's article which claims, the web will fade and new paradigm of XInternet will come up and replace web in about 2-3 years!

Cheers!

Software Aging and Rejuvenation

Common saying goes that only humans age and get themselves rejuvinated. But apparantely Prof. Kishore Trivedi has brought this idea into software paradigm as well. According to him,

Software Aging is:

• Deterioration in the availability of OS resources, data corruption and numerical error accumulation.
• Potential fault conditions gradually accumulating over time leading to either performance degradation or transient failures or both.

Manifestation of aging is seen with performance degradation, crash/hang failure etc. Windows 95 is one such example.

Software Rejuvenation is:

• It is a proactive fault management technique aimed at cleaning up the system internal state to prevent the occurrence of more severe crash failures in the future. It involves occasionally terminating an application or a system, cleaning its internal state and restarting it.

Current methods of software rejuvenation include system restart, application restart (partial rejuventaion).


It seems to be a very interesting idea and is soon starting to become a hot research topic. For more info, click here.

Cheers!

New Year Greetings

Wishing one and all a very happy and colourful new year!

Moron is back after a long overdue vacation. New year resolution: Have a blast on everyday of the year!! Keep up with this space for technological odyssey 2006..

Cheers!

India's IT Capital to be renamed

As reported in news agencies,

Authorities in India have decided to rename Bangalore, the country’s Information Technology capital, as Bengaluru. Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh has asked the state’s top bureaucrat, Chief Secretary B.K. Das, to initiate steps for renaming the city, the NDTV network reported. Bangalore is known as Bengaluru in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in the state. Singh added the change of name was proposed at a meeting of prominent Kannada litterateurs recently. The name change will be effected by November 2006, the golden jubilee of the formation of the state.

Indian authorities continue to bamboozle me. They are renaming Bangalore based on the logic that if Bombay, Madras, Calcutta can change their name suiting their traditional culture, why can't Bangalore follow the suit. But one teeny-weeny point they forgot is that Bangalore is not just India's IT hub, its a powerful global brand now. Outsourcing worldwide is synonymous to Bangalore, they even made a verb out of Bangalore. Changing name of such a brand doesn't make any sense. Come on guys, what local culture are you trying to address with a stupid name as Bengaluru. This is the time when we should be using our brand image and be making big strides in world economy. Alas, but who cares what this moron thinks!

Cheers!

Rejection #1

One down! Plenty more rejections on their way.

$100 Laptop from MIT

A hand-cranked laptop that will cost roughly $100, developed by MIT is expected to be available to poorer countries by late 2006. This project is for bringing poor school children in poor countries closer to computers and create a new wave in field of education.

In principle, the project seems simple: Design a laptop with built-in wireless and minimal power consumption, find manufacturers willing to build it for about $100, convince governments to buy it in quantities of at least 1 million as an initial order, and give it to schoolchildren to keep as their own property.The proposed design of the machines calls for a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and a unique dual-mode display that can be used in full-color mode, or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode. It's not clear yet how much cranking will be needed for the higher-power color mode.

It's expected to run an open-source operating system, probably Linux, MIT Media Lab Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, rather than a closed-source product from Apple Computer or Microsoft. Companies including Google, Advanced Micro Devices, News Corp. and Red Hat have donated to the project. This laptop will surely bring one hell of a technological revolution in developing countries. The wait is on!

Cheers!

Mouse-less Firefox

I always believe one thing that differentiates nerds from newbies is way they handle computer interaction. You will always find nerds, instead of using mouse, use keyboard shortcut keys for interaction. And with the world going gaga over Firefox, here is the list of few keyboard shortcuts that could reduce your trips to the mouse and can lead to a much more fulfilling web browsing experience.

Navigation from the toolbar:

1. Select location bar: Ctrl+L or Alt+D
2. Select search bar: Ctrl+K
3. Change search engine: Ctrl+Down after doing Ctrl+K

Opening pages:

1. New Window: Ctrl+N
2. New Tab: Ctrl+T

Grab Bag:

1. Switch tabs: Ctrl+Tab
2. Select tab (1-9): Ctrl+[1-9]
3. Home Page: Alt+Home
4. Complete .com Addres: Ctrl+Enter

For comprehensive list, click here.

Cheers!

Bill Gates LIVE webcast!

Bill Gates today in Bangalore will launch the next generation of integrated computing platform - SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006. If you don't have the invitation, just do no miss the webcast. Register for Bill Gates LIVE webcast.

[via Enginerd]

Cheers!

foXpose: Cool Firefox Plugin

The Viamatic foXpose plugin is a tiny little extension that lets one view all the tabs inside a browser window. This extension will works only on Firefox 1.5 or higher. With this we just need to click on the icon in the status bar to view all the browser windows with a single click. Its nifty and impressive, check the result:

Install foXpose extension now.

Cheers!

Bill Gates visits India

Bill Gates, chairman and founder of Microsoft Corporation, the chief architect of software revolution, is in India from 6th to 9th December. He has come here with his wife Melinda and had numerous public engagements such as Confederation of Indian Industry-hosted CEOs' Forum and Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in New Delhi. Today there is a Developers' Forum in Bangalore.

As always, a visit from such a high profile personality raises lots of investment hopes and to be true Bill Gates has lived up to the expectations with his announcements. He said that the company will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations. The amount will be deployed across select focus areas in line with Microsoft's strategic vision for India. He also announced that Microsoft will scale up its India operations by increasing the local headcount by 3,000 over three to four years, taking the total strength to 7,000. Gates was emphatically impressed with India's human resource saying, "India has a fantastic pool of software professionals. The world needs to benefit from this. I never thought with so little product companies software services sector will grow so strong as it has grown here."

Bill Gates also met political and industrial heavyweights. He met Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi. He had a meeting with Anil Ambani to discuss cooperation between the two companies on next-generation Internet Protocol (IP)-based television services in India.

This is a very high profile visit and has generated lot of hype. One view is that he came to India and has conquered the mindspace of everyone with his announcements, but techies like me think that he has come here just to buy some cheap labour in disguise of big announcements. Pretty wierd thought.. huh?!

Anyways hail Bill Gates, hail Microsoft because for last few days I have been using Linux extensively and have realized that nothing beats the simple and effective user interface of Windows. I simply love windows!!

For complete coverage of Bill Gates visit to India, click here.

Cheers!

Reboot (Ctrl+Alt+Del)

Rebooting was never such fun.. David Bradley would be so pleased!

World AIDS Day

Today, December 1, is recognized as the international day of action on HIV and AIDS. World AIDS Day is about people getting the facts about HIV and AIDS. Considering that in developing countries like India, AIDS is still considered a taboo, such days should be marked with tremendous awareness campaign. It can make help people accept an HIV positive in the society. Its about time, we make a difference and help eradicate the social injustice done to the sufferers of this deadly disease!

Random #1

Iam creating a repository of some good links on world wide web. Herez the first edition:

1. Celebrity Maps
Hey where does Pamela Andreson live? The question is about to be answered.. unleashing Celebrity maps which combines the power of google maps with celebrity address found across the web.

2. Guess-The-Google
Guess-The-Google is a simple web application in which a grid of images is displayed and the user has to guess the keyword which when entered in google image search will give the same result as is appearing on the grid. Simple but very addictive!

3. Protopage
Protopage provides you free personal start pages. You can have list of your favourite links, some sticky notes, panel amalgamating all search engines. This is how moronz start page looks like.

4. 10 ways to keep updated about new Google services
Google is officially releasing a new product every six days, and a new google rumor cuts the blogosphere’s fresh air every couple of hours. How to keep tabs on all the happenings? Click on the link to find out more.

5. Cool Animation
Click on the link to check out a very nifty and impressive animation.

6. Rtm86
A website made up of only images. Very innovative and very original!

7. Don't Click It
This site is making waves with HCI aficionado's. This site aims to remove the entire concept of mouse clicking.. interesting, isn't it?

Stay tuned for more such randomness.

Cheers!

Did you get an e-mail from FBI?

This is the question that is doing the rounds today in the computer society worldwide. This is because a mass e-mail purportedly from the FBI is circulating online, carrying with it an attachment that contains a variant of the Sober computer virus.

ComputerWorld reports of this fake e-mail scam:

In an announcement today, the FBI advised computer users that the agency never sends unsolicited e-mails and that they should not open the attachments in the fraudulent messages. The scam e-mail tells recipients that their Internet use has been monitored by the FBI and that they have accessed illegal Web sites, according to the FBI. The e-mails, which are sent from e-mail addresses including mail@fbi.gov, post@fib.gov and admin@fbi.gov, then direct recipients to open an attachment and answer questions.

The text of the fake e-mails says: “We have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites. Important: Please answer our questions! The list of questions are attached.” The messages then include a fake name of an FBI official and the real address and phone number of the agency.

No information was available early today on how many of the e-mails might have been sent or how many computer users might have launched the viruses on their machines. The FBI said it “takes this matter seriously and is investigating” the scheme. Recipients of the fake messages are being asked to report them online to the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Hmm.. seems like even, FBI are vulnerable!

Google Base up and running

Yesterday Google officially released Google Base. Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that google will host and make searchable online. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. Google will host the items and make them searchable for free.

Google says "our goal is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible, and the world's information certainly includes almost anything you might wish to contribute. We encourage you to submit your item, whether it's your store inventory, collection of original poetry, or research paper on cancer receptors."

You can read more about google base at google's official blog but Iam off to try my hands at google base first hand.. you coming?

Cheers!

The 8 basic steps of Image Editing

Tweaking around with images is always fun but not everyone's cup of tea. To help dolts like me Matt LeClair author of Oreilly’s, “Photoshop in a Nutshell” has written an article explaining the very basic steps of Image Editing. Author claims that this article will also help you to understand how to use Photoshop’s tools together.

Know, The 8 basic steps of Image Editing and manipulate digitally your way to glory.

Cheers!

The Great Indian Dream aka CAT

The Great Indian Dream is left shattered.. shattered Big Time..

One year long fucking journey to 20th November ended in a huge disaster. Iam left depressed, demoralised and rejected. Life cannot be any more fucking full of shit! Hope the imprints of this Black Sunday are erased from my memory soon..

Letz go sightseeing

Want to go to exotic locations?
Getting in touch with Cox & Kings or SOTC?

No need!, Google Sightseeing offers you the pleasure of roaming around the world from the comfort of your own computer. It is an intelligent and innovative extension exploiting Google's excellent Maps technology.

Google Sightseeing is not a part of Google Maps or even sponsored by Google, it simply links to the data found there, but is an excellent way to quickly locate many of the most popular tourist destinations in the world via satellite images from Google Maps.

So try out Google Sightseeing, meanwhile Iam off to a virtual tour of NYC!

Cheers!

Take on Project Management

By any chance did you ever think that Project Management is a highly systematic and specialized thing? If yes, then your illusion is about to be eliminated..

In case you can't read:

Pic 1: How the costumer explained it
Pic 2: How the project leader understood it
Pic 3: How the analyst designed it
Pic 4: How the programmer wrote it
Pic 5: How the business consultant described it
Pic 6: How the project was documented!!
Pic 7: What operations installed
Pic 8: How the costumer was billed
Pic 9: How it was supported
Pic 10: WHAT THE COSTUMER REALLY NEEDED

Cheers!

World Usability Day: Making it easy

Today, Novemeber 3 is celebrated as the World Usability Day. World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The Usabililty Professionals' Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe, all occurring on November 3, 2005.

Staying put on the same topic of usability, here is a piece of article, which says India is short of 60,000 usability professionals.