Mozart's Birthday

Google Logo's always fascinate me primarily because they celebrate all events including events which one would really not remember though they are important. Thanks to google.com for spreading the word that today is Mozart's Birthday. Kudos to Google team for regularly coming up with such catchy and dynamic logos.

Cheers!

Web Design & Usability Guidelines

A web resource which will be cherished by Web Designers.

National Cancer Institute has build a site which is designed to provide over 50 of the top Web design and usability guidelines based on emerging research and supporting information in the field. Click here to explore the wealth of usability information.

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Nokia Concept Lounge

Take few minutes out, sit back and explore this fantastic design idea from Nokia. Nokia Concept Lounge is a must checkout to understand how creativity can be unleashed in websites.

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Bill Gates at a recent conference!

Photowhere

One problem with digital cameras is that they tend to name their pictures in a cryptic fashion (i.e. DSC0034.jpg).

To help users organize and retrieve digital photographs, a system has been developed, entitled PhotoWhere, which annotates digital photographs automatically with relevant keywords based on data from a GPS receiver and the World Wide Web.
Using a GPS receiver, the system tags each picture with the specific GPS coordinates where it was taken. The system then queries a geographical database that indexes web pages by GPS coordinates, which produces a set of web pages that are associated with these coordinates. Next, these web pages are analyzed using a combination of standard and unique information retrieval techniques in order to best determine what the web pages are about, or even better, what topics and keywords they have in common. From this information, an accurate annotation of about 5-10 relevant keywords is deduced. These keywords are presented to the user in real-time, right after s/he took the picture, thereby giving the user instantaneous information about the place where they are taking a picture. The keywords are also stored with the picture to facilitate keyword-based (and location-based) search and retrieval of pictures from a database.

Photowhere is Interactive Experience Group, MIT Media Labortary project. These people sure are helluva creative bunch!

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New age concept of "Six Degrees of Separation"

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

Social networking sites like Orkut have been pitched as the internet version of the 'six degrees of separation' supposedly connecting most people, first proposed by psychologist Stanley Milgram and Ithiel de Sola Pool. Click here, to read this interesting article which relates the theory to these sites.

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Water resistant PC from Intel @ Rs. 10K

[via Rediff]
Intel Corporation, in an attempt to bridge the digital divide in India, is planning to launch a personal computer priced below Rs 10,000 by this year-end. The global IT major is also on track with its earlier announced plans of investing over $1 billion in the country for its research and development (R&D) initiatives. It is also planning to look at newer locations for setting up centres, in addition to its Bangalore facility.

"We are working on the sub-Rs 10,000 PC and expect it to be commercially available by the end of this financial year. The PC will enable India to become one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world," Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice-president and general manager (sales and marketing group), told reporters on Tuesday.

Click here to read the entire article.

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10 World Changing Web Moments

Webby Awards team has unveiled a list of 10 web moments that changed the web. It talks about the dotcom boom and bust, napster shutdown, 9/11 and much more.

Click here to go through the 10 World Changing Web Moments.

BTW, Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in Web design, creativity, usability and functionality. They are calling in entries for 10th annual webby award, so if you think you have a creative and innovative website at your disposal, just enter your site to win Oscar of the Internet.

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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!

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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.

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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..

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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]

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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.

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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!